Talking with UK friends with moderate or centre right views, they will not be going to USA until Trump and his mob are gone. He is loathed like few other leaders. Treachery is not easily forgiven. That will hit all kinds of US products
It's sadly not an atypical reaction when a Republican wins the Presidency. With Trump being the most extreme example in my lifetime. Then, when a Democrat, like Obama or Biden are elected, there's practically dancing in the streets .
Even more tragic, is that the conservative base has no real idea how much their party is hated abroad for its leader's autocratic, exploitative ways. FOX News will spin anti-US demonstrations nonsensically like "It's because they hate our freedoms." No, they hate us because we're threatening to annex them, or slamming them with 2,000 lb. bombs.
This. Absolutely, THIS. The conventional wisdom is that the Dems/Harris lost last year because of the economy. But it wasn't the economy as much as the PERCEPTION of the economy, generated courtesy of our creative friends at FOX News, who ran endless segments pretty much daily on the ghastliness of Biden economy inflation.
The inflation was terrible, but compared to literally every other nation on earth, we had less severe inflation, along with lower unemployment, faster wage growth, etc. The Biden economy was the best in the entire world.
The kicker is that if Trump had somehow won in '20, FOX News would've done a 180' and run equally endless segments on how much worse inflation was in France, Germany, Japan, Britain, etc., etc. Americans would've been thanking their lucky stars that Trump had kept inflation so low.
Except that inflation wouldn't have been kept so low because Trump was the one that caused it in the first place with his mismanagement of COVID early on. I doubt anyone in his administration would have had a clue about how to manage an economy spiraling out of control any better than they knew anything else.
To be fair, the demand side explanation for Covid inflation is almost certainly false. It was caused by severe supply side contraction due to people staying home and not enough products being made to buy. We all remember the shortages. This is why the inflation magically corrected itself and the fed was able to manage a “soft landing” for once. It would have done that on its own without serious fed action simply because everyone went back to work once the virus mutated to lose its lethality. The only real risk was a more permanent perception of inflation leading to the real thing. Politics had almost nothing to do with it.
Yes, most likely he would've strong-armed the Fed into cutting rates. The economy would've been juiced somewhat--but inflation would've skyrocketed.
But with FOX News in his corner telling everyone that inflation was *even* worse in Kazakhstan, Iran, and Peru; he still possibly could've kept the GOP Congress in power...
APRIL, 2023- Remember when Fox News had to pay Dominion 787 MILLION DOLLARS for making false, that's aka lying, and misleading statements on air??? They admitted it, yet, still they persist....
The vast majority of Americans don't read the Economist. Well, it is kinda pricey. A year's subscription is about a quarter the price of a new 5g smart phone.
But you get truth and objectivity and a world wide picture. Inflation and other economic numbers are there on one of the back pages, every week.
Perhaps so, but all my French friends and relatives were ecstatic when Biden won. Now, they see that reprieve as an anomaly as America shows its true authoritarian face. I’m not sure there is any coming back now for America’s former reputation.
They will probably come around again if they start to believe that Trump was a unique case. He certainly was unusual.
However they are right to be wary. Trump didn’t elect himself, and is a symptom of some much deeper and systematic rot in American governance. It doesn’t serve the people, anymore. Legislation almost exclusively serves the donorsphere, the courts are ineffectual against wealthy individuals and predatory economic practices are the rule from business. Apart from the executive branch (currently being maimed), that sums to pretty much all means of organization in the country. This is not a governance model anyone wants to emulate and that doesn’t help to win friends and influence people.
Obama’s reputation was deserved. He inspired the young people of Europe and the world to get engaged in the destinies of their countries. The thousands of people that filled the streets in Germany and elsewhere was an affirmation that a disastrous inept Bush administration that lied us into war and put the tab on credit card was being replaced by a sane, refreshing young American who hoped for a different world. His reputation was WELL DESERVED. Thank God it’s only in your opinion.
"His reputation was WELL DESERVED," you say. Are you serious?
Do you seriously believe that anyone would have considered Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize AFTER he launched airstrikes or military raids in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan?
In 2008, Obama promised that he will shut down the prison for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. That has never materialized. Obviously Obama was either incapable to keep his promise and therefore incompetent, or else he was mendacious: Which is it?
Obama also promised that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it." The Tampa Bay Times' nonpartisan PolitiFact project awarded this the dubious title of 2013's "lie of the year." Obviously Obama was either incapable to keep his promise and therefore incompetent, or else he was mendacious: Which is it?
Finally, Obama did not only have malware planted on the German Chancellor's phone, he had greenlighted illegal surveillance on US citizens thereby violating the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. Is that your idea of a POTUS worthy of being deified?
I could go on and on, but this should be sufficient to justify that I do not think that Barack Obama walked on water. Of course Obama was NOT an insane criminal like the current POTUS, but that is a low, low hurdle to clear.
In particular, Biden was not an insane criminal either, and for some incomprehensible reason, he seems to have a lesser reputation than Obama. I believe it should be the other way round.
Coming from a Philadelphia resident -- people absolutely did dance in the streets when Biden won in 2020. I have a vivid memory of the election being called mid-day on a Saturday, and I heard cheers and screams coming from outside my apartment after the announcement. I went outside and people were quite literally celebrating and dancing in the streets. A lot of people (naively) thought the Trump long national nightmare was over.
Katie, I know that there was dancing in _US_ streets. I do not contest that.
But just from what I heard and noticed in Europe, reactions were rather muted in comparison. Partly, I suspect, because Trump is MUCH more reviled over here, and so it was a bit of a disappointment that he lost only by a hair's breadth in 2020.
That's what was behind the reported "but for how long?" People are aware that there is broad support for authoritarianism in the US, and as long as there are elections at all, it's a coin flip whether the next POTUS is insane.
The videos showing fireworks I remember. Church bells rang in Paris. I believe you need to understand that these were not spontaneous celebrations by ordinary citizens, who can't simply go and buy explosives as they please, nor are they able to ring church bells on a whim.
For "people all over the world dancing in the streets" I would appreciate some evidence. I tried to find any, but Google only referred to such celebrations in the US.
I wish like hell that a president like Obama had been willing and able to do more good work, like the Affordable Care Act, fulfilling the destiny we hoped for him. Unfortunately, the Kleptocrats in the world, among whom Trump is only the most visible, prevented him from doing so and will continue to prevent anyone from doing so until their powers are much reduced. We need to take seriously the necessity for doing away with Citizens United and other dark money channels in our politics AND we need to start supporting even more of those politicians who are ready, willing and able to speak out most truly for us. Right now they are calling themselves Democrats and Independents. In the future, if mainline Dems don't find ways to be more effective, they may choose other names.
I don't think eliminating Citizens United goes far enough. Extreme personal and corporate wealth would soon find ways to do the same democracy destroying things.
I think we have to return to the tax and salary structure that followed WW II so that billionaires are taxed out of existence and corporations are reigned in. No one needs billions, and that level of wealth is guaranteed to lead to antisocial behavior and havoc.
I’d be happy with simple straightforward campaign finance laws containing no legal work arounds. As things are, we have no campaign finance laws.
Maybe something like no more than two $50 contributions, cash or value from anyone each year. And no purchases of products from any party or candidate having implied a run or announced a run.
If we're talking electoral reform I'd go with an end to gerrymandering and open primaries.
Given the rapid changes we've seen; Musk's seizure of government institutions and data, disregard for court orders starting now, media collapse into acquiescence and the weaponization of the justice department, I don't know that we'll have recognizable elections.
Trump tried to steal the 2020 election but wasn't prepared and failed. As we now see, they are prepared.
Ranked choice voting and an end to primaries is what we really need to end polarization. Primaries are the problem in non-swing states because the primary is the real election, and so only the party faithful get to vote on the candidate, extremism is no vice against the opposition and reason need not apply. Everyone else not in the dominant party is completely disenfranchised. most states are not swing states and they are the problem.
With ranked choice voting (or similar alternative system) once a reasonable and moderate candidate is able to get a lot of 2nd place votes and instant runoffs, then it becomes a good political choice to steer towards the middle, which is what we need.
I've given lots of thought to how wealth affects human behavior. It is a key factor. I tend to view this as an engineer, not a typical liberal arts type with a string of letters after their name. So I have a very narrow audience for my ideas especially when they are reduced to relatively simple math.
OOPs! I used that terrible word, "math". And eyes glaze over.........
It's also worth remembering that Obama was a centrist Democrat. Despite how Obama was falsely portrayed by the righttwing media Obamas spent over a year of his first term trying to forget bipartisan relationships with Congress.
He was never going to be that president that progressive fantasized about.
Everything you said, but let's encircle it with the idea of totally rethinking what democracy should look like. There are so many weaknesses that the Radical Right have exploited that need to be turned into strengths. It will be a hard fight but when we get the majority back, with new leadership, we need to be ruthless in asserting our will to have a working democracy that protects everyone's freedoms. Rebalancing the Supreme Court needs to be priority one, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is priority #2, and overturning Citizen's United is priority #3. Then We the People can elect people who represent us rather than rule us.
All the changes discussed here are possible if we join together and shut down the economy. All the rules can be re-written. I’m expecting a lot of unemployment in our future when all this chaos causes a deep recession. Consumers are cutting back on everything.
This court is completely illegitimate because they’ve undermined democracy through many nonsensical decisions over the last 25 years . This court was handpicked by dark money billionaires. Judges can be impeached for having an anti democratic agenda. A new court with broad public support can quickly over-rule the dark money decisions that have done so much damage. That can’t happen right away but there’s hope for the future.
Bernie’s agenda is what we have to get behind. He’s been right all along and Democrats did a great disservice by putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary. The democrats have lost their legitimacy too. We need a people’s party with a working class agenda that holds wealth to account. Democracy and a high level of income inequality are not compatible.
Shutting down the economy would be a call to action, but given the current set of elected actors, it is a real stretch to think that we would like any of the solutions they came up with. The time to do this is ironically when the Democrats have a super majority.
The Affordable Care Act is the definition of Kleptocracy. Have you looked at the outcomes in American healthcare since the ACA went into effect in 2014. We look like a less developed country. The big for insurers are preying on the public programs Medicare and Medicaid generating huge profits while for the past 10 years life expectancy is basically unchanged, maternal mortality has increased infant mortality is also flat and measures of overall preventable deaths from heart disease diabetes, etc make us look like we’re not an advanced nation. Now private equity firms are buying up all kinds of smaller provider practices and it’s not from altruism. If you want to blame the victims who happen to have serious illnesses for poor outcomes that’s one defense. My favorite villains are the large industrial food corporations.
This is very different to previous Republicans as of course Trump is not a Republican - he has turned the party into something completely different. In the U.K. people might have disliked Reagan’s policies, closely linked as they were to Thatcher but he was not actively disliked and the 2 of them got on famously. Similarly Bush and Blair despite Iraq. The dislike for Trump runs much deeper and the bullying and betrayal of Zelensky was perhaps the last straw and a real turning point.
It's almost a certainty he's a direct KGB (FSB) asset. And psychologically adapted to being under their control a long time ago. But KGB control has also included a lot of Russian Oligarch investment money flowing in to buy Trump apartments. Likely at Putin's urging; to keep his asset financially solvent.
There's also the long history of Deutsche Bank's extensive loans to Trump--after bankruptcy number five, when no other lender would go near him--to consider. Without which, the Trump empire would've largely collapsed. It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't the Kremlin making those loans happen.
I think it is more an unwitting Putin/Russia asset. He has been given a favourable view of Russia, fueled largely by his frail ego open to flattery. Putin uses Trump’s bombast to create division in the US & Europe, and has largely succeeded. Trump remains convinced that Putin is his friend.
Honestly, as an American, its shocking. When you take it in full context of the nations history with Russia, his betratal of Ukraine for them is pretty unforgivable.
I would kill to have the freedoms they have in the EU. Universal healthcare, maternity leave, strong regulations on the rich and a government that helps its people? Sign me the fuck up. The only freedom we have in America that Europeans don't is the freedom to die in a mass shooting at any moment because somebody had a bad day.
No, no. All of those EU bennies would cut waaaay too much into tax cuts for our Oligarch class. The Republican elites that run DC and Wall Street would rather open a thousand new fronts in the culture wars, than give us any of what EU citizens receive as normal.
I'm a Brit in the US for many years, my 4 kids & grands also here. A brother in UK has been telling me to 'get out of there' for months now, but that is not so simple - a house to sell, decades of 'stuff' to get rid of or take with you - I dabbled with the idea then decided at 85 it was just too hard. Nobody EVER imagined that this situation could happen ! Somehow I understand why there is no actual complete uprising happening yet - people cannot accept this is happening in this country - your own life seems to go on as normal & now that even the Covid scare has subsided we all breathe a sigh of relief & 'carry on carrying on' - as the Brits say ! YET WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A COUP !!!!
Not arrogance; but misinformation. Specifically, they're cursed by Murdoch's tabloid non-news, systematically luring them into an imagined fantasyland of grievance. Just like we are by FOX News and its lesser imitators.
The November Ipsos poll found that 85% of US Trump voters get some/most/all of their news from FOX News, And of those, 80% were living in alternative facts la-la land, where Dems murder (abort) babies after birth and Haitian immigrants are eating people's dogs and cats.
The reason why Trump spewed those lies during the Presidential debate is because conservative viewers *implicitly already believe that shit*. They literally lap it up, because they've already heard it a few dozen times on FOX or Sinclair. Or, if it's a brand new lie, then FOX will either corroborate it...or if it's just too crazy weird, simply ignore it.
The pessimists with money ended up in London. The realists, like my mother, 23 years old, a teacher in Transylvania when that much batted-about region was given by the conquering Nazis to the Hungarian puppet government, went to Auschwitz. East- and Central-European Jewry had a far harder time getting out, regardless of their take on politics, than even Italians.
We were Brits living in the US for 20 years and we made contingencies should Trump Parte Deux occur - tbf there were other factors in play as well - but by the end of 2023 it was fairly obvious he was going to win the election and having endured the first 💩 show we decided to bail. For most of last year people would look incredulously at us when we explained where we’d moved from. Now they just nod in agreement…
You might consider paying someone to pack you up & get you moved out of harm’s way. There are many of these services available now, given all we boomers are aging out. Just because you’re not simply downsizing shouldn’t disqualify you from taking advantage of services to aid you in fleeing for your own safety.
The Covid scare has retreated but Covid has not. According to Carlyn Zwarenstein in Salon, between 23K and 39K have died in the US in the past 6 months, and the elderly are particularly at risk. Under the NHS, you will get two Covid boosters a year as well as flu and RSV jabs.
It’s not a matter of months, it’s already here. Last year SCOTUS revised Artcle 2 of The Constitution to make a king. This year Congress eliminated Articles 1 by refusing to exercise its powers. That leaves Article 3, the judiciary, which was subverted in the past few days by ignored orders to stop specific deportations.
You nailed my thoughts. I’m 80, with ancestors that came here in the 1600s. I wish I had an Irish, British or French passport. This coup is the end of America.
Sadly many Americans live inside a rightwing nest bubble, and believe that urban America is a Hell scape, with huge gangs of criminal immigrants roaming the streets. Thry also have bought into thr MAGA culture wars in which these who are people of color, feminists, LGBTQ aren't really Americans.
When they lose their jobs and healthcare they’ll have to realize they’ve been had. The Republicans are about to strip them bare. The veterans already understand he’s a liar.
"Nobody EVER imagined that this situation could happen!"
With all due respect that is sadly naive. It may have seemed unthinkable before 2016, but only if one was unfamiliar with the true history of this country. After Trump's first four years in office and his millions of supporters, the threat, if not limited to Trump than from some other fascist demagogue, was obviously very real. One thing Americans should have learned during Trump's first term was just how inadequate the Constitution is. That, too, is rooted in our history.
I understand that at 85, leaving would be too much of a burden. I wish you well in your remaining years. I'm 77, and given what has happened to the U.S. I wouldn't want to be younger. What has happened? In one sense it began with the decline, though degeneration may be a better descriptor, of the GOP beginning no later than the 1980s under Reagan, its acceleration after the ascendance of Gingrich in 1994, and the ever greater abandonment of reason, truth, science and democracy after 2000. The culmination of that was with Trump's winning the nomination in 2016. The party as a conceivable force or good or good government was entirely gone at that point.
Seventy-seven million Americans voted for the worst president in U.S. history. In the post-election explanations for the outcome, I believe that the real cause, which is also the real threat to this country, was ignored. That is the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate. Nothing is more frustrating than listening to someone deny this. All one has to do is engage average voters in discussion about government, the Constitution, economics, or key issues (inflation, for example) and it becomes immediately apparent how little most Americans know. To vote responsibly, a voter needs to know much more than what is typical of Americans. Professor Krugman has pointed out issues like inflation, that were key to Trump's victory. But would an intelligent, well-informed voter ever believe that Trump either would or could reign in inflation ("On day one")? How well-informed could someone be (or smart) to believe that Trump would only deport immigrants who are criminals? How dumb or ignorant does a voter have to be to expect Trump to appoint excellent people to critical positions? How smart of well-informed can someone be if they lived through Trump's first term, his election denial, his incitement of insurrection, his criminal indictments and conviction, and his 2024 campaign and still think he should be president?
> I believe that the real cause… is the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate.
How dare you criticize the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate? We worship stupidity in this country, because after all, only a simple man can be trusted to be honest! /s
You are of course correct, but to be fair, the intelligentsia have made a right nuisance of themselves ever since greed became good. The best and brightest have mostly sold out to moneyed interests to deliver shareholder value rather than benefit the collective welfare. We abandoned government for the private sector and spent our days drawing up 31 page predatory phone contracts, pay day loans and credit default swaps. There are still a few good men around, but it takes far more work to be one than is good for society.
At the end of the day, the problem is not government, but the board room, a den of crony capitalism where it is $1 : 1 vote, the common man can never go, and the corporate officers believe themselves legally required to serve no interest but the shareholder, whoever this blessedly spoiled group of people of indeterminate citizenship turns out to be. The boardroom is where the plan hatched to beggar the electorate leading to so much rage and confusion that they elect Trump of all people to burn it all down. They call it shareholder primacy. After all, government doesn’t set the inflation lagging salaries. Boardrooms do.
The masses are stupid, but the elite are culpable and as a result our collective labors go to enrich a handful of people that have far more than they can ever spend already. Who would have ever set out to design such a system?
"At the end of the day, the problem is not government..."
I don't disagree with you about the "boardroom," but that sits atop our chosen economic system. As for he government, while Democrats are far from perfect and many are only a bit better than worthless, the real governmental problem is the Republican Party, but that again is the responsibility of the voters who continue to elect truly horrible people to represent them. And you fail to acknowledge that it is the government, especially the Republicans, that enables the board room.
I always have the feeling that the great tendency in this country is to stop short of the core problem. The ultimate responsibility of anyone in office is the people who voted for them. It isn't even the educational system, which in much of America is poor, but particularly today with the Internet, all the information anyone could want or need to vote responsibly is available, if people are willing to look for it. When I taught in a poor, southern New Mexico town, the vast majority of students had no interest at all in learning. That failure rests in large part on their parents, who were poorly educated and didn't model or value a desire to learn. I offered students in 9th grade Honors classes, lessons that those who did them ranked as the best, most interesting they had ever done in school, and in each of the four classes, between a quarter and a third of the students opted to not bother doing the lessons. Yes, they were so used to doing mindless worksheets that the idea of actually becoming engaged was alien to them, but the majority managed, while that 25%-33% simply took zeroes and then complained.
The causes are many, but we don't have a society today that is nurturing and producing anywhere near the best people it could. Millions fall far short of their potential or end up with little or no potential at all. It's tragic.
To find the real root causes of our plight today, we can start with the founding of this country, which is rooted in genocide, dishonesty, theft, and slavery set in motion by the best and the brightest. We've had almost 250 years to improve things and our progress has been poor, at best. Thus, in 2025, seventy seven million people voted to re-elect the worst president in our history and his status was known or knowable to every voter. If voters were smart enough to stop voting for Republicans, as an initial step, we could conceivably turn this country around. What can one say about seventy seven million people who are willing to vote for Trump? No, electing Harris would not have fixed anything, but it would have prevented it from being crushed in the next four years. The real "fix" would take decades, and with the specter of climate change looming, those may well be decades we don't have. But, as it is, we aren't even trying.
There are a couple of unjustified premises here that you might reconsider:
* Voting achieves something. Boss Tweed once said “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating” This is good old fashioned 1850s corruption, but we still see some of that today with very little choice in the democratic primary in 3 of the last 4 elections. However, things have gotten more sophisticated since then. It now doesn’t matter who the candidates are because they quickly learn that if they want to be reelected they need to do what the donorsphere wants. Money determines policy. Donors are not the poor or even the middle class. See Gilens and Page for proof of this relationship.
*We can infer the behavior of adults from children. There are several profound developmental milestones that separate middle schoolers from adults, most significantly their ability to plan ahead and regulate their own behavior. It is bad enough that minors are not legally able to exercise self determination everywhere, without exception. Adults work. Kids avoid it.
So, what do you do about it? End democracy? Forced voter education camps? Only govt employees can vote?
People can make sensible enough decisions based on how things are turning out for them under a set of policy choices. If they are falling behind they will vote for something else. If they continue to fall behind then they get angry and are more willing to vote for radicalism. Trump is in my book a symptom, and if you want to solve Trump, you need to solve root cause. Fix the source of the anger.
Im not a trump voter but in my estimation, Nearly all of the anger boils down to Democrat party behavior:
1) too aggressive with social progress. The country will begrudgingly accept gay marriage as harmless, but will not accept that adolescents know themselves well enough to be able to competently decide on surgery to change their gender identity. At best they will accept government has no role in this decision, but the rest are really distracted by this sort of stuff. Obviously there are more issues, like DEI which has transcended its purpose to a metastatic superstitious ritual we do to avoid tort, and ongoing rage over conflation of tax rates (low) and tax complexity (extreme).
2) too timid with economic progress. NAFTA, end of welfare as we know it, ACA, failure to raise minimum wage for decades — all major democratic initiatives since Clinton either make the lives of the working man worse or cruelly ignore him for other priorities (IRA), even if those other priorities are good ones. They have abandoned the working class.
Solve working class problems and they will not be so incoherently angry that they vote for the raving looney whose rage resonates with their own.
Simply put, Democratic leadership has stamped out economic liberalism as ruthlessly or more so than republicans. They have no voice anywhere and it is time they did because we’ve run out of functional conservative solutions to problems.
However lazy is not the full word for it. Voters do not believe they have the answers, understand in depth the workings of government or fiscal policy such that they could do a better job themselves, nor do they know the candidates intimately enough to be sure of their action. They probably justifiably are making half hearted choices in an area where they have no business but every right and expectation to participate.
Nor is politics alone in this problem. If we look at the rate of new tech adoption, we consistently see a long flat exponential ramp up before even 10% of the population will buy the product that can take years or decades to work its way out. If buyers were able to independently evaluate a new idea, there would be a much higher initial uptake and the growth wouldn’t be exponential. Exponential growth happens when existing owners convince new buyers to switch. Then there are more owners who can convert an ever increasing number of laggards and it grows exponentially. Crucially under this mechanism, the new buyer is not making his own decision but copying off the exam from the guy sitting next to him. They don’t understand the thing and know they aren’t qualified. I would put to you that this is in fact how we make the vast majority of our decisions except in areas where we have true expertise such as our chosen profession. It is why EV adoption is so slow and why advertising works, and why we can write books like “Popular delusions and the madness of crowds” because sometimes the prevailing opinion is quite wrong but spreads virally anyway because it rings true or satisfies some other itch.
You’d think that alone would be enough to give his supporters pause. Our biggest adversary going back 80 years supports him. Surely they have our best interests in mind…
Is there a similar trump resistance within the US? Are people boycotting products from/travel to Red states? Are they still going to Disney in Florida?
I have stopped all business with MAGA businesses! Adios MAGA hair colorist, so long to the popular Labrador Retreiver breeder who spouts biblical quotes in her website while she votes to take away rights of others. I'm getting my new puppy from a non-MAGA breeder (yes I asked)!
Only spending on essential items (my local grocery store and farmer's market, hardware store)! Cut back eating out to 1 day a week! I am in the top 2% and could keep spending but I believe it is my patriotic duty to starve the U.S. economy! I am supposed to run the Chicago Half Marathon in May but will not go. Will only travel to Canada and the EU.
I understand your sentiment and I am with you but I still think it’s OK to go to good blue state for things. I have relatives in Seattle and friends, and I feel OK about that too. I think Illinois marathon should be fine, because Pritzker is doing a wonderful job.
I believe in the right to spend my money the way I choose. I've had a couple of traumatic experiences with shelter dogs. I also don't want to be sued if my rescue dog bites someone. A friend of mine has a rescue and she has muzzle him whenever she goes out because he goes after UPS delivery and mail carriers. I've always loved Labs but couldn't afford one. Now I'm in my golden years, well off and I get to spend my money for a well bred family dog.
If you live someplace like NYC the selection of appropriate shelter dogs is extremely limited. It's half pit bull type dogs and the small ones are mostly mixed chihuahuas.
City shelters house unadoptable dogs (from indiscriminate breeders aiming for the most aggressive dogs and dumping the rest) for whatever time they can and then they kill them. A lot of local taxpayer money paid for nothing.
I am a Chicagoan. We have not lost our minds here and would love to have you visit, like we love people from everywhere to visit. Please reconsider, Chicago is an amazing city, especially in May.
Former Bumpkin, It is certainly your right to spend where and how you see fit. However, while you starve the economy, you will also starve servers, small business owners of many restaurants, your mechanic who won't see you as often since you won't be driving as much, etc. Perhaps you will help the small farmers at their market and the grocers since you will be eating in more. IMO, "starving the economy" by such measures is not very helpful anyway.
My only power right now is my wallet. I will continue to buy local food, local cafes and restaurants, my Pilates studio, local non-MAGA only businesses. It feels very empowering to not support fascist businesses!
I'm also a senior, so I can understand that sense that one's power is contracting. At the same time, there are other ways to help if your time and health allow. Last week, I participated in 5 Consumer Advocacy Week meetings with Congressional staff. I have done this before for various issues, but I am not a professional lobbyist. I'm just using a skill I developed because I feel strongly about the issues. Perhaps examine your own skills and see how they might fit the current situation? I suggest this to all. Commenting here and not spending at MAGA businesses is not enough to change the chaos and grifting.
Excellent point. I've been arguing with my good friends, people who despise drumpf, to stay away from red states, as I do, and avoid products from red states. Blowing in the wind.
I live in a red state, and despise Trump and the Republican Party. Moving to a bluer location, or avoiding products and services here, is impossible. Simply avoiding red states is not realistic for most people. We’re too interconnected.
Unfortunately, we are too interconnected. Over the past 70 years, the US underwent an internal process similar to globalization, resulting in manufacturing jobs moving from North, East and West to the cheap labor Confederate states. Now it’s really difficult to find consumer goods produced in your own region.
That's a little outdated. 40 years ago the North was using cheap labor in the South. My little town had two textile mills and a metals manufacturing factory. But then all that got outsourced to Mexico, and from there to Vietnam and China, etc. What manufacturing remains is low wage labor from foreign companies. The metal manufacturing factory has been replaced with a French bicycle company. The textile mills are long gone. The town has survived by switching to tourism based service industry, but most towns in the region were not so lucky.
Kinda like trying to buy Canadian...sourced in Mexico, assembled in North Carolina...with a quick trip up to Mississauga... it is really that we all have been buying North American
I see now Trump’s power will be temporary, just like Bidens was. Power teeters back and forth 50/50 by design. After 2024, I realized the ccp is trying to get us to fight each other. Nobody wants to hate anymore . Nobody wants a civil war
Americans know we are getting manipulated. Entities like the CCP, Ukraine, and others should stop the manipulation now before they do damage to their future relationship with the USA.
Russia will probably be invaded soon, by the CCP, probably without a fight. China already changed their maps to include Russian territory. Meanwhile, the CCP will be suffering economic hardship due to the empty cities they built. They will need food aid.
Yes! We never travel to, or buy products from, any red states. Unfortunately, we live in Florida, but we’re spending more of our time and $$$ in NYC.
Just as important, boycott the Trumpist oligarchs like Bezos (https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapeAmazon/) and Musk. Don’t buy their products. We’ve cut down our Amazon purchases by 80% in the past two months, and I will never buy a Tesla.
Yes! I make it a point to avoid buying from American corporations. My spending has dropped a lot since Trump was elected and when I do buy discretionary items, I try to get them from thrift shops and Temu. I'll be vacationing in Europe this year.
We can boycott Name Brand Products from those corporations (not just in red states) supporting trump. There are several amazingly long lists of them circulating on the web. Happily surprised that I don't use even one of those products!
I think a lot of the resistance problem is who wants to stick their neck out and organize. Not me. Right now, places like this are just libs talking to libs and not worth notice...but a year or two from now?
The rank and file MAGAs still haven't figured out how cooked they are, but the crazy has been so fast I think the enthusiasm is waning already. Musk, Trump and 2025 are getting out over their skis as they barrel downhill. The little magas are pleased to smack the arrogant libs with their DEI and sure, they want to deport criminals. That's all good, but why does Trump keep trolling Canada for God's sake? Enough it's rude. Russia is really our friend now? Hunh? The tariffs off and on and on. The little magas voted for prices dropping and now Trump says we might have a recession, really...wtf?
Yes, kind of. It is really hard to think it a good idea to send your daughter to college in the South, given then legal gun pointed to her head should she become pregnant there. But then again, the best colleges are not in the south anyway, with the possible exception of Rice, so why go to a college all the way there? We aren’t going to Trump resorts but he doesn’t really own very much, so we wouldn’t have anyway. Most of the wrath is landing on Musk and Tesla instead. Apart from that, it is usually hard to tell if the product comes from Tennessee or New York. Too many come from Malaysia anyway, and it is a fair bit of work to dig up which hardware chains donate predominantly to republican causes (Home Depot) and which do not (Lowe’s).
Disney is a fairly liberal company anyway, so it isn’t really clear that if you find yourself in Orlando whether your dollars are primarily benefitting Ron Desantis or the company that fought him bitterly.
Tourism has been a major US export. Until 2025. Europeans will under the new US regime likely be supplanted by Chinese and Russians. What goes around comes around.
Buying military hardware involves lots of details and billions of dollars. You want to feel sure that you can get spare parts and upgrades, and buying from a nation ruled by a mafia boss is far from tempting.
Yeah. For what it's worth, though, Trump does seem like the type that would be happy to sell weapons to just about anyone with the money to pay for them.
But no buyer can be sure that scum-p won't later take an irrational dislike to him and then refuse to sell necessary replacement parts or upgrades. His instability is a huge deterrent.
Would anyone have predicted his "Annex Canada" nonsense a few years ago? That he would turn a great friend / ally / trading partner into an enemy? He's becoming more deranged with each day, almost certainly bc of some form of dementia -- which proceeds in only one direction.
I'm an expat in NZ. Trips to the grocery produce section have been very informative lately. The produce from California is marked "product of USA". It is now on "super sale", and rotting in the bins.
certainly Loblaw's, the canadian national chain where I shop, is going to great lengths to point out Canadian products, and offering lots of non-US produce. Does it make sense to get grapes in Toronto from Peru? Not much, but I'm not buying them from California.
Speaking from California, this is not Trump country! We didn’t vote for him and haven’t elected a republican to statewide office in well over a decade. If anything, California is the leader of the resistance. It will be certainly be leading the fight with CARB against whatever Trump plans to do to accelerate climate change.
Perhaps we still don’t deserve your patronage being Americans and all, but we’d like to be friends.
Even though California is a blue state, the farmers (of whom my father is one) in our Central Valley that grow much of the States produce, are Trump cultist. They didn’t even bat an eyelash when he gave their water reserves for summer crops away for LA fires (even though it didn’t arrive there and LA already had plenty of water). So, keep boycotting California produce. Perhaps that will jolt the Trump loving farmers out of their Trump Cult trance.
I feel your pain! I'm from a very red town in the Sacramento valley. Just so ashamed of my relatives (and former classmates)! They are the first to have their hand out for government subsidies yet knock the blue states and cities that pay the bulk of taxes to bail them out! Makes me so angry!!!
Frankly any California farmer growing a water-rich product for export (I’m not talking about almonds, those trees may drink, but their product is dry) does not give a damn about keeping California water for California needs, and if they don’t give a damn about regional ecology, I’m not participating in their folly. California wine makes sense (if you do drink wine), but California produce should be 1000-mile delimited. And milk? Forget it. Excepting those for the regional market, those dairies should up and move to the Midwest.
The claim that the United States retains control over much of the weaponry it has sold to its allies is not just true—it is central to understanding the mounting alarm in European capitals at Trump’s turn towards Putin and his growing hostility toward America’s traditional partners. The architecture of U.S. military dominance has long rested not just on the quantity or sophistication of its arms exports but on the strategic control embedded within them.
Through software locks, geofencing, and remote operational constraints, Washington can limit the use of critical weapons systems at will. This is not conjecture; it is observable in the functionality of HIMARS and Patriot air defenses, where the U.S. maintains the ability to impose operational restrictions remotely—an effective kill switch. The process is somewhat slower for aircraft like the F-35, but no less consequential: the global spares pool for the jet is managed by the U.S. Department of Defense, which can restrict access to vital components at a moment’s notice. Even the UK, America’s closest military ally, must pay the U.S. to access data from its own fleet of F-35s—data that is automatically transmitted to American servers.
Layered atop this is another dimension of dependence: the reliance on Starlink and other U.S.-controlled communications infrastructure, which has already proven to be a source of leverage in the Ukrainian war effort. The implications are stark. The problem facing Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan is not merely one of rearmament in the event that the United States ceases resupply; it is that Washington could, in effect, disable their most advanced weapons overnight.
In this sense, Trump does indeed hold all the cards. The threat he poses is neither abstract nor distant—it is immediate, tangible, and deeply unsettling to those whose security depends on continued American goodwill and currently experience inexplicable ill-will.
Jim - How feasible would it for other nations to take full control over things like F-35 aircraft? Could they manufacture their own spare parts or data systems in an emergency if they had to? (ignoring any legal constraints)
Hard to predict. At present, the uncomfortable reality is that Europe remains fundamentally dependent, sourcing 63% of its armaments from American suppliers—a relationship born not merely of convenience but of decades of deliberate policy choices that have atrophied European defence capacities.
The absence of a coherent joint procurement framework reflects a deeper malaise: Europe's persistent inability to conceive of itself as a unified strategic entity rather than a collection of nation-states with occasionally overlapping interests.
What has changed, quite dramatically, is the psychological landscape. Trump's capricious manipulation of Ukrainian intelligence access has delivered a shock to the European consciousness far more effective than decades of earnest policy papers from Brussels. There is profound wisdom in the old adage that nothing concentrates the mind quite like the prospect of hanging. The Europeans, having glimpsed the executioner's noose, now find themselves with an unaccustomed clarity of purpose.
I'm more positive about Europe. Collectively it's a military giant with more soldiers available than the US military, especially after Sweden and Finland have joined, both of whom have enermous armies. There are defence gaps which need to be filled but Russia's military has been shattered in Ukraine and it has an economy smaller than Italy's. Britain and France still have their nuclear deterrent, which would preclude any Russian attack on the Baltic or Poland. I'm actually more concerned about Trump's threats to Greenland and Canada, although in theory they both enjoy NATO protection.
Britain's nuclear deterrent is even more subject to US oversight than the F-35. Britain builds its own warheads but has depended on US delivery systems since 1960.
The challenge is one of time. The probability that Russia will seek to continue its advance beyond Ukraine is high. Moldova, then the Baltic states, are the natural next steps, creating a wider and major European war. If such an assault is to take place, it makes sense for Moscow to act before Europe has re-armed—before, that is, the continent’s newfound alarm has translated into actual military capacity. That window is narrow.
But the deeper source of anxiety is not just the certainty that the United States, under Trump, will not defend Europe. It is the question of whether Washington will go further and actively disable Europe’s capacity to defend itself. He has already demonstrated what he demands in return for the arms previously supplied to Ukraine. Why would the same logic not apply to Europe? When he says he will "get Greenland," he may well be right. He understands the leverage he holds over Europe, as do the Europeans.
Truly scary. They must also see how he treating Canada and calling it the 51st state and trying to destroy it through tariffs to force it to capitulate to join the US. And none of this actually benefits Americans. All the spoils go to the oligarchs.
Any capitulations to Trump/Musk/2025 have to be weighed with the fact that he/they are liars and will change their mind at will. If they demand Greenland it won't be long before they demand Canada.
Military kit is also changing quickly. Those great big billion $ ships/planes can be taken out with far cheaper drones.
It will take some time. Public opinion doesn't change that quickly, unless they sneak like Russia did in Ukraine. Still American's aren't quite as cowed as the Russians...yet.
Second (or perhaps really the first) task: finding different sources for arms. Canada is looking to replace most of the F-35 contract with planes that can be assembled in Canada and for which the software can be managed from within Canada - Saab's plane is one of the possibilities.
Question: since the US has become an unreliable ally and even hostile, could Europe and China eventually end up in some kind of an alliance? A US-Russia alliance is an immediate threat to Europe/NATO countries, but it would also be a threat to China. It seems like an imperialistic emboldened Russia with US weapons at its fingertips would make Chinese officials worry about its territorial integrity.
It's not inconceivable, but I suspect Russia is more worried about Chinese encroachment in Siberia. Russia is in demographic decline, it's now barely a France + Germany with an economy smaller than either.
Russia is in demographic decline, but if the US-Russia become outright allies Putin would have access to American weaponry and support from American soldiers. Considering the imperialistic narcissism of Putin and Trump (who both appear to suffer from some psychiatric ailment), it’s no longer completely inconceivable they might stumble into a border confrontation with China. Particularly since they both emphasize white identity politics. I would never have thought it possible having spent half my life in the Cold War era, but so did millions of other Americans who now admire Putin and want to be more like Russia. Considering the willingness of so many Americans to go along with the dismantling of the Republic and historical alliances, they probably wouldn’t finally draw a line at helping Russia in a border war with China.
It can't be done overnight. The American public isn't ready yet. There has to be more propaganda. Hopefully, that gives democracies a chance to make defensive plans.
We, most likely, will be weakened with economic problems from the ignorant/arrogant measures now being put in place.
That only works for more advanced US supplied weapons, or those containing important US techology. Recently the 3 biggest US military manufacturers have been losing in stock market, & 3 biggest European have been gaining. Expect that trend to continue.
The influence of Trump/US is bound to diminish over time.
For Ukraine, it is only certain advanced technology in near term critical to protect cities. On the front lines it is much less problematic, since they produce much of their own arms & Europe has already been stepping up.
I've been there. Years ago, I scheduled a trip to St. Peterburg for my family to visit Russian grand parents. When Putin started locking up tourists, I canceled, losing much I had already paid for. Now Putinism has come to America.
"Just to be clear, I’m much more worried about the threat Trump poses to democracy than his bad economic policies. "
I'm not at all sure you can decouple those two things. Destroying democracy here really makes it clear that Donald Trump IS the United States. His reputation as a skeevy untrustworthy business partner has been built up over his entire lifetime. Only the fact that America still has (at least notionally) some semblance of democracy that could conceivably lead to Trump's peaceful ouster is what keeps the rest of the world doing any business with the US at all.
But if Trump literally becomes dictator and the US is his personal brand, I think you'll see this country crater in ways that can't be anticipated. From US exports falling to functionally zero to countries such as China and India become the world-dominant forces by default, the US could be rendered not just a pariah but an irrelevant and impotent giant.
I agree. Democracies need healthy economies that support and grow the middle class. I think the reason populism/fascism has been gaining traction and incumbents are being thrown out, both here and in Europe, is people have been deeply dissatisfied with their economies. The too slow recoveries after the 08 collapse and post-Covid have badly weakened support for democracy.
In ‘08 EU governments insisted on austerity which severely hampered their ability to recover. The US had the best recovery because Obama spent significantly more, but he was prevented by Republicans from spending enough to speed up our recovery.
That same austerity approach was aplied after the Covid economic collapse, except in the US where the economy bounced back robustly because Biden spent bigly. Unfortunately the majority of voters had no idea that the US economy was so strong so they voted for Trump to “fix” our nonexistent recession.
What I find currently is the reaction to those two events and the reaction to the Great Depression. Americans embraced the New Deal after Hoover’s austerity policy for nearly 40 years afterwards. They also rejected the American fascist movement in the late 1930s. Since 1980 US voters keep embracing trickle down economics (a form of austerity), then complain it doesn’t work for them. So what’s different about between the two eras? The biggest difference is civil rights, with women and minorities having achieved greater equality until the recent roll backs. Another is the mythology presented on TV to Boomers when they were children, which seems to have supplanted reality for that generation and its offspring. Pinpointing why Americans have reacted so differently could result in a remedy.
I think you need to look at what most people are watching or listening to. When I’ve talk to fox opinion viewers, they are clueless about well publicized issues which I assume other opinion media including FB either block or play down. The number of protests is barely mentioned, if at all, on both legacy and opinion media. Calling them news is a false narrative IMP.
This is an interesting question and I often wonder why the widespread outrage of the banking system bailout after the 08 debacle did not destroy trickle down. But I think it has to come down to this victim mentality that reacts to scarcity by wanting to take away from the “other” rather than to confront the real culprit: anti democratic wealth disparities.
Viewers of Fox "News" and followers of Donald Trump have been propagandized to believe that any program that aims to help the disadvantaged is taking away money from a limited pool of funds, and that the deserving (white, middle class, etc.) will suffer grievously. On the contrary the multiplier effect of sharing the wealth produces greater wealth, because the little people spend their money in the same economy as the rest. Likewise the lies told about the deserving vs. the undeserving result in the inability to fold people into a productive whole and lots of energy being wasted on justifying the unjustifiable exclusion from productive society of a whole segment of the population.
And thus we find ourselves in this unbelievable situation where many poor and middle class voters have chosen the candidate that best serves the tech oligarchs at their expense
Strictly speaking, not even democracy is needed any longer to oust Trump, only rule of law. He can only serve two terms. After that, only lesser office is available, he loses the recently discovered immunity from prosecution of the unitary executive, and the prosecutions can resume preexisting and new.
Given the legal jeopardy hanging over his head, though, we should assume the man to be highly motivated to find a way to stay in office beyond is tenure, and willing to do most anything to avoid jail time.
I have just returned from London and the anti-American sentiments are real. People are relieved when they hear one also thinks Trump and Musk are insane racists, but the economic costs to the US are going to be real. No one wants to travel to a place where they worry they will be locked up and which is openly supporting Russia and enacting tyranny.
I will shed no tears for the lost sales by the war profiteers. Frankly I would cheer if Lockhead, Raytheon and Grumman all went bankrupt. I will also she no tears for the Floriduh tourism industry. The voters of Floriduh love to elect Republicans. Let them feel the consequences of their bad choices.
I am with you on Florida but not so sure about the military companies - unless all cocuntries in the world do the same.. Instead of building bombs, the world should be focused on solving the climate crisis before we destroy ourselves..
Wars are very bad in very many ways, including by distracting from the need to urgently solve the climate crisis. Unfortunately, in the neighborhood of certain countries, true peace, in the sense of the peoples getting along with each other without threatening each other, isn’t available. So we need to settle for credible deterrence to prevent war, and for that reason military companies cannot simply be gotten rid of. I’d support clear rules though against the supply of military equipment to countries whose military stance isn’t clearly purely defensive.
This. China will be almost certainly be taking us on within a few years. Xi has publicly said he wants the PLA/PLAN to be ready to invade and take Taiwan by 2027.
I work in online marketing in Germany, and most of our tools are US based. Those tools need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and ePrivacy directives, which means a vendor in a 3rd party state needs to make sure that in his country personal data is protected in the same way as within the European Union, including a way to seek legal redress for privacy violations, which is not easily possible since a privacy violation by EU standards would not grant anyone standing in an US court. That was mitigated by the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework, which largely relied on an Executive Order by former President Biden. Not only has Donald Trump dissolved the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as one of the cornerstones of the Data Privacy Framework, it would probably also difficult to convince a European court that a country that grants Edward "Big Balls" Coristine access to government databases after he has been fired by a previous employer for leaking secrets could be trusted to handle personal data of EU residents responsibly. So we are all now just waiting for the moment when somebody actually brings this to court, because if the EU insists on enforcing their own law, this just would blow up all internet related business in Europe. In the long run it means Europe has to build its own cloud computing, crm, analytics etc facilities, so there is another bit of business that will go out of the window for the US in the long term, because this time it will not be possible to convince anybody that the situation can be remedied.
One of the things that are new is that most people thought, even knowing that the US would not take our privacy law too seriously, that there was no real danger because after all the US are the most reliable ally. In this brave new world it is kind of a spooky idea that the US government can get easy access to location data and behavioral patterns of a few hundred million Europeans. People complained about the complexity of privacy laws, but these are the situations they were designed to prevent. But nobody believed those laws would have to protect us against the US. Once we take the effort and unravel this dependency, and given your tendency to pivot on a dime between moderates and fascists (if there will even be an opportunity to pivot in the foreseeable future) there will be no going back, and living in a permanently more divided world might be necessary, but is still a sad thought.
OTOH it might not be too hard to find Americans experienced in these areas who are willing to come to Europe and help set up and work in these businesses.
Technology is not really the issue, for most software there are alternatives already -it is not that we do not know how things work, it's that competing with oligopolies so far has not been commercially viable (more social equality in Europe also means not so much money sloshing around to fund random businesses until one becomes the next Google or whatever). Transitioning a continent away from US software without breaking the businesses that rely of it will be the problem (also an opportunity obviously, but still difficult and expensive).
I can't keep from noting how breathtakingly careless of the people to have cast a vote for President. My God, President of the United States! For such a morally, incompetently, and insanely unqualified person as Trump. Would anyone want such a person teaching their children? Would anyone consider such a person to be their doctor? Would anyone want such a person coming into their house to fix a washing machine?
But President? Why not. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably, they thought that when the temple was pulled down it wouldn't fall on them too.
Even if the next (will there be a next?) Administration was Jesus and Moses, it could not restore the trust we once had. There will always be the chance we might go crazy again. The damage has been immense, and it suspiciously looks like everything Trump has been doing is Putin's wish list.
Orin, after the lights are out your point is what haunts. Do American's want their children to emulate this man? It feels as though the reaction is about to go exothermic.
The thing to understand is the electorate is irate and therefore irrational. I’m not a big student of German history, but I don’t think Hitler would have gotten anywhere without Weimar and the outrageously expensive Treaty of Versailles. As long as we don’t address our ongoing assault on the working man, we risk many more deeply anti-qualified candidates for office, because Joe Sixpack wants to burn it all down.
The malfeasance is a feature, not a bug. They voted FOR this.
Canadian here. The whole F-35 procurement was the biggest scam.
You want to talk about subsidizing allies, Mr. Trump?
The United States bamboozled its allies into paying for the most expensive fighter jet in history by luring them with the prospect of fancy kit in exchange for... crippled domestic maintenance services contracts.
Sixty-five years later, the folly of the Canadian government cancelling the Avro Arrow development program becomes apparent. Cancelling that one lighthouse project severely damaged our military industrial capability for many decades afterwards and nearly destroyed Canada's aviation sector in the process. The brain drain and the resulting loss of know-how that resulted from it was devastating.
And we did it because the Americans said, "We have a cheaper one that is ready to go. We'll share it with you. Trust us, we're your friends."
Well, that malarkey is f---ing over, if you'll pardon my French.
One of the arguments for this abandonment was always of the form "Canada is too small a country to support advanced fighter development."
Fast-forward to today. There is a substantial chance Canada will now be buying the SAAB JAS 39 Gripen instead. The Gripen is an advanced fighter built by Sweden, a country of (today) 10.5 million people.
It's rarely the first-order effects of a bad choice that get you. It's the nth-order effects.
The American electorate are about to find out how that feels.
Lost sales may be one of the few things trumpie magats at all wealth levels may understand, assuming the data make it through the propaganda shield and their own brain fog
The New York/New Jersey media mostly treated Trump as a colorful celebrity, not the corrupt man he really was. That information was known because there were a couple of journalists — the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Cay Johnston — who reported in depth on Trump’s criming but most chose to turn a blind eye. Barrett began covering the Trump Org’s shady dealings starting way back in the 70s; Johnson’s reporting focused on Trump’s corrupt dealings in Atlantic city. Law enforcement also kept giving Trump a pass.
It was obvious even 3,000 miles away there was something odd going on with the NY press. Virtually every community has had its version of Trump, but the local media didn’t treat them the way NY media treated Trump. The fourth estate in NY really failed the country.
Yeah, growing up in Pennsylvania, I had to hear about his nonsense my whole life. I still remember seeing constant tabloid headlines about his affairs and divorces when I was a kid in the 80s while going grocery shopping with my mother.
For a wealthy person, all that matters is tax cuts. Ask any of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and they will gently explain to you that it is far better to pay $20,000 in taxes on $100,000 than it is to pay $250,000 in taxes on $1,000,000. It's just simple math!
NZ has recently tried to follow a similar slash-and-burn approach to government spending on the back of tax cuts for the wealthy. But those euphoric benefits quickly dissipate as public costs are transferred into real private costs as social systems begin to crumble.
Everyone needs to understand, this will not end in four years. Maga Malcontents will remain after Trump has stoked their rage. It's the justice evading Republican Revolution first declared by Newt Gingrich in 1994. It's real
Yeah, that’s what makes this go-round so much worse than the first one. He could croak this afternoon and because he’s stuffed the government full of neo-Nazis hellbent on destroying democracy, the carnage would continue. I’m certainly not advocating this, just an observation, but this will not end non-violently.
Watch Bad Faith documentary for a chronicle of the Christian Nationalists plan to dismantle the government - https://www.badfaithdocumentary.com/. Trump is only a tool. The damage will last beyond his administration
It was declared even before Newt. In 1953 Joe McCarthy, together with Roy Cohn and Tricky Dickie, set the monster in motion. From there it was a straight line: Tricky Dickie -> Reagan -> King Bush I -> King Bush II -> King Krasnov.
You are thinking about Eugene McCarthy who was as far away politically from any of these guys. He was the quintessential peacenik. Same last name different parties, states and ideologies.
Joe McCarthy was a Republican. "Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957."
The untimely death of Joe McCarthy due, apparently, to hepatitis (no attempt in the story to explain where this came from) and alcoholism. He made some attempt to come to terms with political opponents when it was already too late.
I realized that Republicans were the biggest speculators in real estate as a real estate appraiser since the late 70s. They disgraced we experts and now AI and tech bros would have our profession all but fired!
Many appraisers are small shops of very independent individuals who have consistent education on fair housing laws and ethical rules that require us to address relevant data upon which to base our conclusions and opinions. Yet we have been censored by Fannie and Freddy and new appraisals for loans will pre-populate your assignment with AI comparable sales.
Another non-staff, untrained sub-contractor will go by the house and take photos. Probably not interiors, so all that remodeling or upgrades are not known. Nor are defects in construction or non-operable appliances or plumbing.
Algorithms didn't serve Zillow's ability to flip houses, but they contributed to the exorbitant appreciation in prices!
We have bailed out the S&Ls in 1990, let the banks engineered a new financial crisis in 2007, and now we have gambling in the stock market and the powers that be are not interested in an independently appraised property will only get in their way.
I think other countries‘ monetary authorities should be (and probably are) thinking hard(er) about diversifying their reserve currencies . . . another aspect of loosing trust - or imperial hubris. . .
Talking with UK friends with moderate or centre right views, they will not be going to USA until Trump and his mob are gone. He is loathed like few other leaders. Treachery is not easily forgiven. That will hit all kinds of US products
It's sadly not an atypical reaction when a Republican wins the Presidency. With Trump being the most extreme example in my lifetime. Then, when a Democrat, like Obama or Biden are elected, there's practically dancing in the streets .
Even more tragic, is that the conservative base has no real idea how much their party is hated abroad for its leader's autocratic, exploitative ways. FOX News will spin anti-US demonstrations nonsensically like "It's because they hate our freedoms." No, they hate us because we're threatening to annex them, or slamming them with 2,000 lb. bombs.
I agree about Obama's (IMO not entirely deserved) fantastic reputation in Europe.
Biden? When he was elected and announced "America is back, boys!", people did not dance in the streets. They replied "maybe, but for how long?"
AND yet is had the Best economy in the world...maybe people should travel a bit MORE..inflation is everywhere and ALOT WORSE
This. Absolutely, THIS. The conventional wisdom is that the Dems/Harris lost last year because of the economy. But it wasn't the economy as much as the PERCEPTION of the economy, generated courtesy of our creative friends at FOX News, who ran endless segments pretty much daily on the ghastliness of Biden economy inflation.
The inflation was terrible, but compared to literally every other nation on earth, we had less severe inflation, along with lower unemployment, faster wage growth, etc. The Biden economy was the best in the entire world.
The kicker is that if Trump had somehow won in '20, FOX News would've done a 180' and run equally endless segments on how much worse inflation was in France, Germany, Japan, Britain, etc., etc. Americans would've been thanking their lucky stars that Trump had kept inflation so low.
Except that inflation wouldn't have been kept so low because Trump was the one that caused it in the first place with his mismanagement of COVID early on. I doubt anyone in his administration would have had a clue about how to manage an economy spiraling out of control any better than they knew anything else.
To be fair, the demand side explanation for Covid inflation is almost certainly false. It was caused by severe supply side contraction due to people staying home and not enough products being made to buy. We all remember the shortages. This is why the inflation magically corrected itself and the fed was able to manage a “soft landing” for once. It would have done that on its own without serious fed action simply because everyone went back to work once the virus mutated to lose its lethality. The only real risk was a more permanent perception of inflation leading to the real thing. Politics had almost nothing to do with it.
Yes, most likely he would've strong-armed the Fed into cutting rates. The economy would've been juiced somewhat--but inflation would've skyrocketed.
But with FOX News in his corner telling everyone that inflation was *even* worse in Kazakhstan, Iran, and Peru; he still possibly could've kept the GOP Congress in power...
APRIL, 2023- Remember when Fox News had to pay Dominion 787 MILLION DOLLARS for making false, that's aka lying, and misleading statements on air??? They admitted it, yet, still they persist....
The vast majority of Americans don't read the Economist. Well, it is kinda pricey. A year's subscription is about a quarter the price of a new 5g smart phone.
But you get truth and objectivity and a world wide picture. Inflation and other economic numbers are there on one of the back pages, every week.
"The vast majority of Americans don't read." There, I fixed it for you.
The vast majority of Americans will start reading when they can't pay their monthly eye candy bill and they start going to bed hungry.
We won't be there until Musk's "whiz" (slang for urinate) kids learn Cobol and give Musk the ability to turn SS into his own personal Ponzi scheme.
Hey!! A new business opportunity. Diapers 4 Whiz Kids..
Perhaps so, but all my French friends and relatives were ecstatic when Biden won. Now, they see that reprieve as an anomaly as America shows its true authoritarian face. I’m not sure there is any coming back now for America’s former reputation.
My French neighbours, German, Italian, and Swiss friends all appreciated Biden.
They will probably come around again if they start to believe that Trump was a unique case. He certainly was unusual.
However they are right to be wary. Trump didn’t elect himself, and is a symptom of some much deeper and systematic rot in American governance. It doesn’t serve the people, anymore. Legislation almost exclusively serves the donorsphere, the courts are ineffectual against wealthy individuals and predatory economic practices are the rule from business. Apart from the executive branch (currently being maimed), that sums to pretty much all means of organization in the country. This is not a governance model anyone wants to emulate and that doesn’t help to win friends and influence people.
Obama’s reputation was deserved. He inspired the young people of Europe and the world to get engaged in the destinies of their countries. The thousands of people that filled the streets in Germany and elsewhere was an affirmation that a disastrous inept Bush administration that lied us into war and put the tab on credit card was being replaced by a sane, refreshing young American who hoped for a different world. His reputation was WELL DESERVED. Thank God it’s only in your opinion.
"His reputation was WELL DESERVED," you say. Are you serious?
Do you seriously believe that anyone would have considered Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize AFTER he launched airstrikes or military raids in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan?
In 2008, Obama promised that he will shut down the prison for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. That has never materialized. Obviously Obama was either incapable to keep his promise and therefore incompetent, or else he was mendacious: Which is it?
Obama also promised that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it." The Tampa Bay Times' nonpartisan PolitiFact project awarded this the dubious title of 2013's "lie of the year." Obviously Obama was either incapable to keep his promise and therefore incompetent, or else he was mendacious: Which is it?
Finally, Obama did not only have malware planted on the German Chancellor's phone, he had greenlighted illegal surveillance on US citizens thereby violating the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. Is that your idea of a POTUS worthy of being deified?
I could go on and on, but this should be sufficient to justify that I do not think that Barack Obama walked on water. Of course Obama was NOT an insane criminal like the current POTUS, but that is a low, low hurdle to clear.
In particular, Biden was not an insane criminal either, and for some incomprehensible reason, he seems to have a lesser reputation than Obama. I believe it should be the other way round.
Coming from a Philadelphia resident -- people absolutely did dance in the streets when Biden won in 2020. I have a vivid memory of the election being called mid-day on a Saturday, and I heard cheers and screams coming from outside my apartment after the announcement. I went outside and people were quite literally celebrating and dancing in the streets. A lot of people (naively) thought the Trump long national nightmare was over.
Katie, I know that there was dancing in _US_ streets. I do not contest that.
But just from what I heard and noticed in Europe, reactions were rather muted in comparison. Partly, I suspect, because Trump is MUCH more reviled over here, and so it was a bit of a disappointment that he lost only by a hair's breadth in 2020.
That's what was behind the reported "but for how long?" People are aware that there is broad support for authoritarianism in the US, and as long as there are elections at all, it's a coin flip whether the next POTUS is insane.
There were live videos shown of fireworks, and people all over the world dancing in the streets, when Biden won, Paris and London, particularly.
The videos showing fireworks I remember. Church bells rang in Paris. I believe you need to understand that these were not spontaneous celebrations by ordinary citizens, who can't simply go and buy explosives as they please, nor are they able to ring church bells on a whim.
For "people all over the world dancing in the streets" I would appreciate some evidence. I tried to find any, but Google only referred to such celebrations in the US.
I wish like hell that a president like Obama had been willing and able to do more good work, like the Affordable Care Act, fulfilling the destiny we hoped for him. Unfortunately, the Kleptocrats in the world, among whom Trump is only the most visible, prevented him from doing so and will continue to prevent anyone from doing so until their powers are much reduced. We need to take seriously the necessity for doing away with Citizens United and other dark money channels in our politics AND we need to start supporting even more of those politicians who are ready, willing and able to speak out most truly for us. Right now they are calling themselves Democrats and Independents. In the future, if mainline Dems don't find ways to be more effective, they may choose other names.
I don't think eliminating Citizens United goes far enough. Extreme personal and corporate wealth would soon find ways to do the same democracy destroying things.
I think we have to return to the tax and salary structure that followed WW II so that billionaires are taxed out of existence and corporations are reigned in. No one needs billions, and that level of wealth is guaranteed to lead to antisocial behavior and havoc.
I’d be happy with simple straightforward campaign finance laws containing no legal work arounds. As things are, we have no campaign finance laws.
Maybe something like no more than two $50 contributions, cash or value from anyone each year. And no purchases of products from any party or candidate having implied a run or announced a run.
But it will probably never happen.
If we're talking electoral reform I'd go with an end to gerrymandering and open primaries.
Given the rapid changes we've seen; Musk's seizure of government institutions and data, disregard for court orders starting now, media collapse into acquiescence and the weaponization of the justice department, I don't know that we'll have recognizable elections.
Trump tried to steal the 2020 election but wasn't prepared and failed. As we now see, they are prepared.
Ranked choice voting and an end to primaries is what we really need to end polarization. Primaries are the problem in non-swing states because the primary is the real election, and so only the party faithful get to vote on the candidate, extremism is no vice against the opposition and reason need not apply. Everyone else not in the dominant party is completely disenfranchised. most states are not swing states and they are the problem.
With ranked choice voting (or similar alternative system) once a reasonable and moderate candidate is able to get a lot of 2nd place votes and instant runoffs, then it becomes a good political choice to steer towards the middle, which is what we need.
Amen
I've given lots of thought to how wealth affects human behavior. It is a key factor. I tend to view this as an engineer, not a typical liberal arts type with a string of letters after their name. So I have a very narrow audience for my ideas especially when they are reduced to relatively simple math.
OOPs! I used that terrible word, "math". And eyes glaze over.........
It's also worth remembering that Obama was a centrist Democrat. Despite how Obama was falsely portrayed by the righttwing media Obamas spent over a year of his first term trying to forget bipartisan relationships with Congress.
He was never going to be that president that progressive fantasized about.
I think you mean "forge". (Darn spell check!)
Everything you said, but let's encircle it with the idea of totally rethinking what democracy should look like. There are so many weaknesses that the Radical Right have exploited that need to be turned into strengths. It will be a hard fight but when we get the majority back, with new leadership, we need to be ruthless in asserting our will to have a working democracy that protects everyone's freedoms. Rebalancing the Supreme Court needs to be priority one, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is priority #2, and overturning Citizen's United is priority #3. Then We the People can elect people who represent us rather than rule us.
You can also blame the Dems in both house and senate during the first two years of Obama’s first term…
Getting rid of Big Money in our politics is primordial, I suspect.
All the changes discussed here are possible if we join together and shut down the economy. All the rules can be re-written. I’m expecting a lot of unemployment in our future when all this chaos causes a deep recession. Consumers are cutting back on everything.
This court is completely illegitimate because they’ve undermined democracy through many nonsensical decisions over the last 25 years . This court was handpicked by dark money billionaires. Judges can be impeached for having an anti democratic agenda. A new court with broad public support can quickly over-rule the dark money decisions that have done so much damage. That can’t happen right away but there’s hope for the future.
Bernie’s agenda is what we have to get behind. He’s been right all along and Democrats did a great disservice by putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary. The democrats have lost their legitimacy too. We need a people’s party with a working class agenda that holds wealth to account. Democracy and a high level of income inequality are not compatible.
Shutting down the economy would be a call to action, but given the current set of elected actors, it is a real stretch to think that we would like any of the solutions they came up with. The time to do this is ironically when the Democrats have a super majority.
The Affordable Care Act is the definition of Kleptocracy. Have you looked at the outcomes in American healthcare since the ACA went into effect in 2014. We look like a less developed country. The big for insurers are preying on the public programs Medicare and Medicaid generating huge profits while for the past 10 years life expectancy is basically unchanged, maternal mortality has increased infant mortality is also flat and measures of overall preventable deaths from heart disease diabetes, etc make us look like we’re not an advanced nation. Now private equity firms are buying up all kinds of smaller provider practices and it’s not from altruism. If you want to blame the victims who happen to have serious illnesses for poor outcomes that’s one defense. My favorite villains are the large industrial food corporations.
This is very different to previous Republicans as of course Trump is not a Republican - he has turned the party into something completely different. In the U.K. people might have disliked Reagan’s policies, closely linked as they were to Thatcher but he was not actively disliked and the 2 of them got on famously. Similarly Bush and Blair despite Iraq. The dislike for Trump runs much deeper and the bullying and betrayal of Zelensky was perhaps the last straw and a real turning point.
Reagan wasn't a KGB (FSB) thrall. Thank God.
Trump is a Putin stooge, but just thinks that Putin is his "friend".
It's almost a certainty he's a direct KGB (FSB) asset. And psychologically adapted to being under their control a long time ago. But KGB control has also included a lot of Russian Oligarch investment money flowing in to buy Trump apartments. Likely at Putin's urging; to keep his asset financially solvent.
There's also the long history of Deutsche Bank's extensive loans to Trump--after bankruptcy number five, when no other lender would go near him--to consider. Without which, the Trump empire would've largely collapsed. It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't the Kremlin making those loans happen.
I think it is more an unwitting Putin/Russia asset. He has been given a favourable view of Russia, fueled largely by his frail ego open to flattery. Putin uses Trump’s bombast to create division in the US & Europe, and has largely succeeded. Trump remains convinced that Putin is his friend.
Honestly, as an American, its shocking. When you take it in full context of the nations history with Russia, his betratal of Ukraine for them is pretty unforgivable.
I would kill to have the freedoms they have in the EU. Universal healthcare, maternity leave, strong regulations on the rich and a government that helps its people? Sign me the fuck up. The only freedom we have in America that Europeans don't is the freedom to die in a mass shooting at any moment because somebody had a bad day.
No, no. All of those EU bennies would cut waaaay too much into tax cuts for our Oligarch class. The Republican elites that run DC and Wall Street would rather open a thousand new fronts in the culture wars, than give us any of what EU citizens receive as normal.
A very accurate assessment on your part.
Americans have been hated for a long time but now since there are consequences like years ago
The demonstrations, if there are any, are because the U.S. apparently hates THEIR freedoms.
I'm a Brit in the US for many years, my 4 kids & grands also here. A brother in UK has been telling me to 'get out of there' for months now, but that is not so simple - a house to sell, decades of 'stuff' to get rid of or take with you - I dabbled with the idea then decided at 85 it was just too hard. Nobody EVER imagined that this situation could happen ! Somehow I understand why there is no actual complete uprising happening yet - people cannot accept this is happening in this country - your own life seems to go on as normal & now that even the Covid scare has subsided we all breathe a sigh of relief & 'carry on carrying on' - as the Brits say ! YET WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A COUP !!!!
Brits are now cursed by Brexit. The same arrogance that gave us trump.
Not arrogance; but misinformation. Specifically, they're cursed by Murdoch's tabloid non-news, systematically luring them into an imagined fantasyland of grievance. Just like we are by FOX News and its lesser imitators.
The November Ipsos poll found that 85% of US Trump voters get some/most/all of their news from FOX News, And of those, 80% were living in alternative facts la-la land, where Dems murder (abort) babies after birth and Haitian immigrants are eating people's dogs and cats.
The reason why Trump spewed those lies during the Presidential debate is because conservative viewers *implicitly already believe that shit*. They literally lap it up, because they've already heard it a few dozen times on FOX or Sinclair. Or, if it's a brand new lie, then FOX will either corroborate it...or if it's just too crazy weird, simply ignore it.
You cant have a functioning democracy when half the voters live in a false reality in their own minds.
When Mussolini imposed the racial laws, the pessimists fled to London, the optimists ended up in the ovens.
The pessimists with money ended up in London. The realists, like my mother, 23 years old, a teacher in Transylvania when that much batted-about region was given by the conquering Nazis to the Hungarian puppet government, went to Auschwitz. East- and Central-European Jewry had a far harder time getting out, regardless of their take on politics, than even Italians.
sending love
In my view we won’t know until the rule of law is disbanded. It’s hard to predict when the door shuts after that, though.
We were Brits living in the US for 20 years and we made contingencies should Trump Parte Deux occur - tbf there were other factors in play as well - but by the end of 2023 it was fairly obvious he was going to win the election and having endured the first 💩 show we decided to bail. For most of last year people would look incredulously at us when we explained where we’d moved from. Now they just nod in agreement…
You might consider paying someone to pack you up & get you moved out of harm’s way. There are many of these services available now, given all we boomers are aging out. Just because you’re not simply downsizing shouldn’t disqualify you from taking advantage of services to aid you in fleeing for your own safety.
The Covid scare has retreated but Covid has not. According to Carlyn Zwarenstein in Salon, between 23K and 39K have died in the US in the past 6 months, and the elderly are particularly at risk. Under the NHS, you will get two Covid boosters a year as well as flu and RSV jabs.
Only if over 65 or immunocompromised…
The coup is almost finished. Another few months and bye bye! Good luck
It’s not a matter of months, it’s already here. Last year SCOTUS revised Artcle 2 of The Constitution to make a king. This year Congress eliminated Articles 1 by refusing to exercise its powers. That leaves Article 3, the judiciary, which was subverted in the past few days by ignored orders to stop specific deportations.
You nailed my thoughts. I’m 80, with ancestors that came here in the 1600s. I wish I had an Irish, British or French passport. This coup is the end of America.
Sadly many Americans live inside a rightwing nest bubble, and believe that urban America is a Hell scape, with huge gangs of criminal immigrants roaming the streets. Thry also have bought into thr MAGA culture wars in which these who are people of color, feminists, LGBTQ aren't really Americans.
When they lose their jobs and healthcare they’ll have to realize they’ve been had. The Republicans are about to strip them bare. The veterans already understand he’s a liar.
"Nobody EVER imagined that this situation could happen!"
With all due respect that is sadly naive. It may have seemed unthinkable before 2016, but only if one was unfamiliar with the true history of this country. After Trump's first four years in office and his millions of supporters, the threat, if not limited to Trump than from some other fascist demagogue, was obviously very real. One thing Americans should have learned during Trump's first term was just how inadequate the Constitution is. That, too, is rooted in our history.
I understand that at 85, leaving would be too much of a burden. I wish you well in your remaining years. I'm 77, and given what has happened to the U.S. I wouldn't want to be younger. What has happened? In one sense it began with the decline, though degeneration may be a better descriptor, of the GOP beginning no later than the 1980s under Reagan, its acceleration after the ascendance of Gingrich in 1994, and the ever greater abandonment of reason, truth, science and democracy after 2000. The culmination of that was with Trump's winning the nomination in 2016. The party as a conceivable force or good or good government was entirely gone at that point.
Seventy-seven million Americans voted for the worst president in U.S. history. In the post-election explanations for the outcome, I believe that the real cause, which is also the real threat to this country, was ignored. That is the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate. Nothing is more frustrating than listening to someone deny this. All one has to do is engage average voters in discussion about government, the Constitution, economics, or key issues (inflation, for example) and it becomes immediately apparent how little most Americans know. To vote responsibly, a voter needs to know much more than what is typical of Americans. Professor Krugman has pointed out issues like inflation, that were key to Trump's victory. But would an intelligent, well-informed voter ever believe that Trump either would or could reign in inflation ("On day one")? How well-informed could someone be (or smart) to believe that Trump would only deport immigrants who are criminals? How dumb or ignorant does a voter have to be to expect Trump to appoint excellent people to critical positions? How smart of well-informed can someone be if they lived through Trump's first term, his election denial, his incitement of insurrection, his criminal indictments and conviction, and his 2024 campaign and still think he should be president?
> I believe that the real cause… is the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate.
How dare you criticize the ignorance and stupidity of the electorate? We worship stupidity in this country, because after all, only a simple man can be trusted to be honest! /s
You are of course correct, but to be fair, the intelligentsia have made a right nuisance of themselves ever since greed became good. The best and brightest have mostly sold out to moneyed interests to deliver shareholder value rather than benefit the collective welfare. We abandoned government for the private sector and spent our days drawing up 31 page predatory phone contracts, pay day loans and credit default swaps. There are still a few good men around, but it takes far more work to be one than is good for society.
At the end of the day, the problem is not government, but the board room, a den of crony capitalism where it is $1 : 1 vote, the common man can never go, and the corporate officers believe themselves legally required to serve no interest but the shareholder, whoever this blessedly spoiled group of people of indeterminate citizenship turns out to be. The boardroom is where the plan hatched to beggar the electorate leading to so much rage and confusion that they elect Trump of all people to burn it all down. They call it shareholder primacy. After all, government doesn’t set the inflation lagging salaries. Boardrooms do.
The masses are stupid, but the elite are culpable and as a result our collective labors go to enrich a handful of people that have far more than they can ever spend already. Who would have ever set out to design such a system?
"At the end of the day, the problem is not government..."
I don't disagree with you about the "boardroom," but that sits atop our chosen economic system. As for he government, while Democrats are far from perfect and many are only a bit better than worthless, the real governmental problem is the Republican Party, but that again is the responsibility of the voters who continue to elect truly horrible people to represent them. And you fail to acknowledge that it is the government, especially the Republicans, that enables the board room.
I always have the feeling that the great tendency in this country is to stop short of the core problem. The ultimate responsibility of anyone in office is the people who voted for them. It isn't even the educational system, which in much of America is poor, but particularly today with the Internet, all the information anyone could want or need to vote responsibly is available, if people are willing to look for it. When I taught in a poor, southern New Mexico town, the vast majority of students had no interest at all in learning. That failure rests in large part on their parents, who were poorly educated and didn't model or value a desire to learn. I offered students in 9th grade Honors classes, lessons that those who did them ranked as the best, most interesting they had ever done in school, and in each of the four classes, between a quarter and a third of the students opted to not bother doing the lessons. Yes, they were so used to doing mindless worksheets that the idea of actually becoming engaged was alien to them, but the majority managed, while that 25%-33% simply took zeroes and then complained.
The causes are many, but we don't have a society today that is nurturing and producing anywhere near the best people it could. Millions fall far short of their potential or end up with little or no potential at all. It's tragic.
To find the real root causes of our plight today, we can start with the founding of this country, which is rooted in genocide, dishonesty, theft, and slavery set in motion by the best and the brightest. We've had almost 250 years to improve things and our progress has been poor, at best. Thus, in 2025, seventy seven million people voted to re-elect the worst president in our history and his status was known or knowable to every voter. If voters were smart enough to stop voting for Republicans, as an initial step, we could conceivably turn this country around. What can one say about seventy seven million people who are willing to vote for Trump? No, electing Harris would not have fixed anything, but it would have prevented it from being crushed in the next four years. The real "fix" would take decades, and with the specter of climate change looming, those may well be decades we don't have. But, as it is, we aren't even trying.
There are a couple of unjustified premises here that you might reconsider:
* Voting achieves something. Boss Tweed once said “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating” This is good old fashioned 1850s corruption, but we still see some of that today with very little choice in the democratic primary in 3 of the last 4 elections. However, things have gotten more sophisticated since then. It now doesn’t matter who the candidates are because they quickly learn that if they want to be reelected they need to do what the donorsphere wants. Money determines policy. Donors are not the poor or even the middle class. See Gilens and Page for proof of this relationship.
*We can infer the behavior of adults from children. There are several profound developmental milestones that separate middle schoolers from adults, most significantly their ability to plan ahead and regulate their own behavior. It is bad enough that minors are not legally able to exercise self determination everywhere, without exception. Adults work. Kids avoid it.
I do agree that voters are lazy.
So, what do you do about it? End democracy? Forced voter education camps? Only govt employees can vote?
People can make sensible enough decisions based on how things are turning out for them under a set of policy choices. If they are falling behind they will vote for something else. If they continue to fall behind then they get angry and are more willing to vote for radicalism. Trump is in my book a symptom, and if you want to solve Trump, you need to solve root cause. Fix the source of the anger.
Im not a trump voter but in my estimation, Nearly all of the anger boils down to Democrat party behavior:
1) too aggressive with social progress. The country will begrudgingly accept gay marriage as harmless, but will not accept that adolescents know themselves well enough to be able to competently decide on surgery to change their gender identity. At best they will accept government has no role in this decision, but the rest are really distracted by this sort of stuff. Obviously there are more issues, like DEI which has transcended its purpose to a metastatic superstitious ritual we do to avoid tort, and ongoing rage over conflation of tax rates (low) and tax complexity (extreme).
2) too timid with economic progress. NAFTA, end of welfare as we know it, ACA, failure to raise minimum wage for decades — all major democratic initiatives since Clinton either make the lives of the working man worse or cruelly ignore him for other priorities (IRA), even if those other priorities are good ones. They have abandoned the working class.
Solve working class problems and they will not be so incoherently angry that they vote for the raving looney whose rage resonates with their own.
Simply put, Democratic leadership has stamped out economic liberalism as ruthlessly or more so than republicans. They have no voice anywhere and it is time they did because we’ve run out of functional conservative solutions to problems.
However lazy is not the full word for it. Voters do not believe they have the answers, understand in depth the workings of government or fiscal policy such that they could do a better job themselves, nor do they know the candidates intimately enough to be sure of their action. They probably justifiably are making half hearted choices in an area where they have no business but every right and expectation to participate.
Nor is politics alone in this problem. If we look at the rate of new tech adoption, we consistently see a long flat exponential ramp up before even 10% of the population will buy the product that can take years or decades to work its way out. If buyers were able to independently evaluate a new idea, there would be a much higher initial uptake and the growth wouldn’t be exponential. Exponential growth happens when existing owners convince new buyers to switch. Then there are more owners who can convert an ever increasing number of laggards and it grows exponentially. Crucially under this mechanism, the new buyer is not making his own decision but copying off the exam from the guy sitting next to him. They don’t understand the thing and know they aren’t qualified. I would put to you that this is in fact how we make the vast majority of our decisions except in areas where we have true expertise such as our chosen profession. It is why EV adoption is so slow and why advertising works, and why we can write books like “Popular delusions and the madness of crowds” because sometimes the prevailing opinion is quite wrong but spreads virally anyway because it rings true or satisfies some other itch.
We just don’t know any better.
Maybe wait til the shooting starts and then leave?
Cynically we have a couple of mass shootings every day already.
The key to understanding Trump is there's no method to his madness; only madness.
There’s plenty of method behind Trump’s madness, all of those project 2025 and Heritage foundation people and assorted other tyrant wannabes.
That's Trump's underlings. Trump himself is basically Grampa Simpson.
Precisely, he's a blivet of vile, narcissistic impulse in search of a cortex, and with a moral imagination that makes absolute zero seem balmy.
And those are his good points.
They are just taking advantage of Trump's fragile ego, like Putin/Russia.
He’s following Putin’s plan step by step. He has to be a Russian asset. What more could he do to benefit Putin?
Funny how many try to find a method.
Russia supports Trump since they want to see the resulting chaos, which is evident just listening to 5 minutes of his speech.
You’d think that alone would be enough to give his supporters pause. Our biggest adversary going back 80 years supports him. Surely they have our best interests in mind…
Is there a similar trump resistance within the US? Are people boycotting products from/travel to Red states? Are they still going to Disney in Florida?
I have stopped all business with MAGA businesses! Adios MAGA hair colorist, so long to the popular Labrador Retreiver breeder who spouts biblical quotes in her website while she votes to take away rights of others. I'm getting my new puppy from a non-MAGA breeder (yes I asked)!
Only spending on essential items (my local grocery store and farmer's market, hardware store)! Cut back eating out to 1 day a week! I am in the top 2% and could keep spending but I believe it is my patriotic duty to starve the U.S. economy! I am supposed to run the Chicago Half Marathon in May but will not go. Will only travel to Canada and the EU.
I understand your sentiment and I am with you but I still think it’s OK to go to good blue state for things. I have relatives in Seattle and friends, and I feel OK about that too. I think Illinois marathon should be fine, because Pritzker is doing a wonderful job.
How about oh just maybe go to an animal shelter – why breed when so many good dogs wait forever for good homes
I believe in the right to spend my money the way I choose. I've had a couple of traumatic experiences with shelter dogs. I also don't want to be sued if my rescue dog bites someone. A friend of mine has a rescue and she has muzzle him whenever she goes out because he goes after UPS delivery and mail carriers. I've always loved Labs but couldn't afford one. Now I'm in my golden years, well off and I get to spend my money for a well bred family dog.
If you live someplace like NYC the selection of appropriate shelter dogs is extremely limited. It's half pit bull type dogs and the small ones are mostly mixed chihuahuas.
City shelters house unadoptable dogs (from indiscriminate breeders aiming for the most aggressive dogs and dumping the rest) for whatever time they can and then they kill them. A lot of local taxpayer money paid for nothing.
I am a Chicagoan. We have not lost our minds here and would love to have you visit, like we love people from everywhere to visit. Please reconsider, Chicago is an amazing city, especially in May.
What's special about May? Is that when you have the best weather?
Well, it’s not February!!!
Former Bumpkin, It is certainly your right to spend where and how you see fit. However, while you starve the economy, you will also starve servers, small business owners of many restaurants, your mechanic who won't see you as often since you won't be driving as much, etc. Perhaps you will help the small farmers at their market and the grocers since you will be eating in more. IMO, "starving the economy" by such measures is not very helpful anyway.
My only power right now is my wallet. I will continue to buy local food, local cafes and restaurants, my Pilates studio, local non-MAGA only businesses. It feels very empowering to not support fascist businesses!
I'm also a senior, so I can understand that sense that one's power is contracting. At the same time, there are other ways to help if your time and health allow. Last week, I participated in 5 Consumer Advocacy Week meetings with Congressional staff. I have done this before for various issues, but I am not a professional lobbyist. I'm just using a skill I developed because I feel strongly about the issues. Perhaps examine your own skills and see how they might fit the current situation? I suggest this to all. Commenting here and not spending at MAGA businesses is not enough to change the chaos and grifting.
Excellent point. I've been arguing with my good friends, people who despise drumpf, to stay away from red states, as I do, and avoid products from red states. Blowing in the wind.
I live in a red state, and despise Trump and the Republican Party. Moving to a bluer location, or avoiding products and services here, is impossible. Simply avoiding red states is not realistic for most people. We’re too interconnected.
Unfortunately, we are too interconnected. Over the past 70 years, the US underwent an internal process similar to globalization, resulting in manufacturing jobs moving from North, East and West to the cheap labor Confederate states. Now it’s really difficult to find consumer goods produced in your own region.
That's a little outdated. 40 years ago the North was using cheap labor in the South. My little town had two textile mills and a metals manufacturing factory. But then all that got outsourced to Mexico, and from there to Vietnam and China, etc. What manufacturing remains is low wage labor from foreign companies. The metal manufacturing factory has been replaced with a French bicycle company. The textile mills are long gone. The town has survived by switching to tourism based service industry, but most towns in the region were not so lucky.
Kinda like trying to buy Canadian...sourced in Mexico, assembled in North Carolina...with a quick trip up to Mississauga... it is really that we all have been buying North American
Maybe limit boycotting to whatever's advertised on FOX, Sinclair, WSJ, etc.
For years I'd wanted a Model 3 Tesla; but then Elon went Nazi, and just last month we bought a Nissan Leaf.
How long before blue-state progressives turn in fury against the local NIMBYs, branding them Trump collaborators?
That would be great - time to start delivering on what Americans need, equitable transportation options and healthcare.
I see now Trump’s power will be temporary, just like Bidens was. Power teeters back and forth 50/50 by design. After 2024, I realized the ccp is trying to get us to fight each other. Nobody wants to hate anymore . Nobody wants a civil war
You're a brilliant analyst, clearly. "Nobody wants to hate." Permit me to laugh out loud.
Indeed. The haters are a big part of Trump's base.
Americans know we are getting manipulated. Entities like the CCP, Ukraine, and others should stop the manipulation now before they do damage to their future relationship with the USA.
Russia will probably be invaded soon, by the CCP, probably without a fight. China already changed their maps to include Russian territory. Meanwhile, the CCP will be suffering economic hardship due to the empty cities they built. They will need food aid.
Yes! We never travel to, or buy products from, any red states. Unfortunately, we live in Florida, but we’re spending more of our time and $$$ in NYC.
Just as important, boycott the Trumpist oligarchs like Bezos (https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapeAmazon/) and Musk. Don’t buy their products. We’ve cut down our Amazon purchases by 80% in the past two months, and I will never buy a Tesla.
Yes! I make it a point to avoid buying from American corporations. My spending has dropped a lot since Trump was elected and when I do buy discretionary items, I try to get them from thrift shops and Temu. I'll be vacationing in Europe this year.
Temu? Hmmmm.
We can boycott Name Brand Products from those corporations (not just in red states) supporting trump. There are several amazingly long lists of them circulating on the web. Happily surprised that I don't use even one of those products!
I think a lot of the resistance problem is who wants to stick their neck out and organize. Not me. Right now, places like this are just libs talking to libs and not worth notice...but a year or two from now?
The rank and file MAGAs still haven't figured out how cooked they are, but the crazy has been so fast I think the enthusiasm is waning already. Musk, Trump and 2025 are getting out over their skis as they barrel downhill. The little magas are pleased to smack the arrogant libs with their DEI and sure, they want to deport criminals. That's all good, but why does Trump keep trolling Canada for God's sake? Enough it's rude. Russia is really our friend now? Hunh? The tariffs off and on and on. The little magas voted for prices dropping and now Trump says we might have a recession, really...wtf?
Good question!
Yes, kind of. It is really hard to think it a good idea to send your daughter to college in the South, given then legal gun pointed to her head should she become pregnant there. But then again, the best colleges are not in the south anyway, with the possible exception of Rice, so why go to a college all the way there? We aren’t going to Trump resorts but he doesn’t really own very much, so we wouldn’t have anyway. Most of the wrath is landing on Musk and Tesla instead. Apart from that, it is usually hard to tell if the product comes from Tennessee or New York. Too many come from Malaysia anyway, and it is a fair bit of work to dig up which hardware chains donate predominantly to republican causes (Home Depot) and which do not (Lowe’s).
Disney is a fairly liberal company anyway, so it isn’t really clear that if you find yourself in Orlando whether your dollars are primarily benefitting Ron Desantis or the company that fought him bitterly.
INDIVISIBLE
Ditto big time for my friends in Canada.
Tourism has been a major US export. Until 2025. Europeans will under the new US regime likely be supplanted by Chinese and Russians. What goes around comes around.
Russians, most of them that is, don't have extra money. Trump loves rich Russians but as trading partners in the wider economy they're a joke.
Yep. Was expecting a friend from the UK. I suggested instead that we meet in Canada...
... as long as there's no layover in Chicago ...
Buying military hardware involves lots of details and billions of dollars. You want to feel sure that you can get spare parts and upgrades, and buying from a nation ruled by a mafia boss is far from tempting.
Yeah. For what it's worth, though, Trump does seem like the type that would be happy to sell weapons to just about anyone with the money to pay for them.
Unfortunately the person paying him might be your enemy. They might pay him to “kill switch” your weapons.
But no buyer can be sure that scum-p won't later take an irrational dislike to him and then refuse to sell necessary replacement parts or upgrades. His instability is a huge deterrent.
Would anyone have predicted his "Annex Canada" nonsense a few years ago? That he would turn a great friend / ally / trading partner into an enemy? He's becoming more deranged with each day, almost certainly bc of some form of dementia -- which proceeds in only one direction.
Then the unemployment bump will become a wall
I'm an expat in NZ. Trips to the grocery produce section have been very informative lately. The produce from California is marked "product of USA". It is now on "super sale", and rotting in the bins.
Oh, and I'm from Canada if anyone asks.
certainly Loblaw's, the canadian national chain where I shop, is going to great lengths to point out Canadian products, and offering lots of non-US produce. Does it make sense to get grapes in Toronto from Peru? Not much, but I'm not buying them from California.
I buy grapes in Ca imported from Chile.
I don’t know. about grapes but here in the US we get almost all of our blueberries from Peru or Chile during the winter.
“How the Peruvian desert became the unlikely blueberry capital of the world:
Peru supplies nearly half of the fresh blueberries sold in the U.S.:
After last year’s heatwave, this is how the country is speeding up the race for varieties more resilient to climate change.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/peru-blueberry-industry-boom
Pretty soon we will be getting the. from Florida, then more northern states, assuming there is anyone left to pick them.
Same out here in Kelowna BC...our stores do make an effort to identify where produce is coming from...
Speaking from California, this is not Trump country! We didn’t vote for him and haven’t elected a republican to statewide office in well over a decade. If anything, California is the leader of the resistance. It will be certainly be leading the fight with CARB against whatever Trump plans to do to accelerate climate change.
Perhaps we still don’t deserve your patronage being Americans and all, but we’d like to be friends.
British supermarkets have been doing that for years.
Yeah, I had to do the same thing when working in the Persian Gulf when Reagan took over from Carter.
The only difference is this time our President is an actual KGB (FSB) spy. It's a first.
oh...AND a dictator and influencing the media and and and and and
Even though California is a blue state, the farmers (of whom my father is one) in our Central Valley that grow much of the States produce, are Trump cultist. They didn’t even bat an eyelash when he gave their water reserves for summer crops away for LA fires (even though it didn’t arrive there and LA already had plenty of water). So, keep boycotting California produce. Perhaps that will jolt the Trump loving farmers out of their Trump Cult trance.
I feel your pain! I'm from a very red town in the Sacramento valley. Just so ashamed of my relatives (and former classmates)! They are the first to have their hand out for government subsidies yet knock the blue states and cities that pay the bulk of taxes to bail them out! Makes me so angry!!!
Frankly any California farmer growing a water-rich product for export (I’m not talking about almonds, those trees may drink, but their product is dry) does not give a damn about keeping California water for California needs, and if they don’t give a damn about regional ecology, I’m not participating in their folly. California wine makes sense (if you do drink wine), but California produce should be 1000-mile delimited. And milk? Forget it. Excepting those for the regional market, those dairies should up and move to the Midwest.
Me too
The claim that the United States retains control over much of the weaponry it has sold to its allies is not just true—it is central to understanding the mounting alarm in European capitals at Trump’s turn towards Putin and his growing hostility toward America’s traditional partners. The architecture of U.S. military dominance has long rested not just on the quantity or sophistication of its arms exports but on the strategic control embedded within them.
Through software locks, geofencing, and remote operational constraints, Washington can limit the use of critical weapons systems at will. This is not conjecture; it is observable in the functionality of HIMARS and Patriot air defenses, where the U.S. maintains the ability to impose operational restrictions remotely—an effective kill switch. The process is somewhat slower for aircraft like the F-35, but no less consequential: the global spares pool for the jet is managed by the U.S. Department of Defense, which can restrict access to vital components at a moment’s notice. Even the UK, America’s closest military ally, must pay the U.S. to access data from its own fleet of F-35s—data that is automatically transmitted to American servers.
Layered atop this is another dimension of dependence: the reliance on Starlink and other U.S.-controlled communications infrastructure, which has already proven to be a source of leverage in the Ukrainian war effort. The implications are stark. The problem facing Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan is not merely one of rearmament in the event that the United States ceases resupply; it is that Washington could, in effect, disable their most advanced weapons overnight.
In this sense, Trump does indeed hold all the cards. The threat he poses is neither abstract nor distant—it is immediate, tangible, and deeply unsettling to those whose security depends on continued American goodwill and currently experience inexplicable ill-will.
Jim - How feasible would it for other nations to take full control over things like F-35 aircraft? Could they manufacture their own spare parts or data systems in an emergency if they had to? (ignoring any legal constraints)
Hard to predict. At present, the uncomfortable reality is that Europe remains fundamentally dependent, sourcing 63% of its armaments from American suppliers—a relationship born not merely of convenience but of decades of deliberate policy choices that have atrophied European defence capacities.
The absence of a coherent joint procurement framework reflects a deeper malaise: Europe's persistent inability to conceive of itself as a unified strategic entity rather than a collection of nation-states with occasionally overlapping interests.
What has changed, quite dramatically, is the psychological landscape. Trump's capricious manipulation of Ukrainian intelligence access has delivered a shock to the European consciousness far more effective than decades of earnest policy papers from Brussels. There is profound wisdom in the old adage that nothing concentrates the mind quite like the prospect of hanging. The Europeans, having glimpsed the executioner's noose, now find themselves with an unaccustomed clarity of purpose.
I'm more positive about Europe. Collectively it's a military giant with more soldiers available than the US military, especially after Sweden and Finland have joined, both of whom have enermous armies. There are defence gaps which need to be filled but Russia's military has been shattered in Ukraine and it has an economy smaller than Italy's. Britain and France still have their nuclear deterrent, which would preclude any Russian attack on the Baltic or Poland. I'm actually more concerned about Trump's threats to Greenland and Canada, although in theory they both enjoy NATO protection.
Britain's nuclear deterrent is even more subject to US oversight than the F-35. Britain builds its own warheads but has depended on US delivery systems since 1960.
Indeed it's vital Europe develops strategic autonomy, and I'm increasingly confident they will for the reasons you state.
The challenge is one of time. The probability that Russia will seek to continue its advance beyond Ukraine is high. Moldova, then the Baltic states, are the natural next steps, creating a wider and major European war. If such an assault is to take place, it makes sense for Moscow to act before Europe has re-armed—before, that is, the continent’s newfound alarm has translated into actual military capacity. That window is narrow.
But the deeper source of anxiety is not just the certainty that the United States, under Trump, will not defend Europe. It is the question of whether Washington will go further and actively disable Europe’s capacity to defend itself. He has already demonstrated what he demands in return for the arms previously supplied to Ukraine. Why would the same logic not apply to Europe? When he says he will "get Greenland," he may well be right. He understands the leverage he holds over Europe, as do the Europeans.
Truly scary. They must also see how he treating Canada and calling it the 51st state and trying to destroy it through tariffs to force it to capitulate to join the US. And none of this actually benefits Americans. All the spoils go to the oligarchs.
He talks a lot to see what might fly. Canada as a 51st state won't. And Canada still has all the allies that Trump is alienating.
Any capitulations to Trump/Musk/2025 have to be weighed with the fact that he/they are liars and will change their mind at will. If they demand Greenland it won't be long before they demand Canada.
Military kit is also changing quickly. Those great big billion $ ships/planes can be taken out with far cheaper drones.
It will take some time. Public opinion doesn't change that quickly, unless they sneak like Russia did in Ukraine. Still American's aren't quite as cowed as the Russians...yet.
I imagine one of their first rank tasks is hacking those lock-down systems in US weapons systems.
Second (or perhaps really the first) task: finding different sources for arms. Canada is looking to replace most of the F-35 contract with planes that can be assembled in Canada and for which the software can be managed from within Canada - Saab's plane is one of the possibilities.
Again, OMG.
Question: since the US has become an unreliable ally and even hostile, could Europe and China eventually end up in some kind of an alliance? A US-Russia alliance is an immediate threat to Europe/NATO countries, but it would also be a threat to China. It seems like an imperialistic emboldened Russia with US weapons at its fingertips would make Chinese officials worry about its territorial integrity.
It's not inconceivable, but I suspect Russia is more worried about Chinese encroachment in Siberia. Russia is in demographic decline, it's now barely a France + Germany with an economy smaller than either.
Russia is in demographic decline, but if the US-Russia become outright allies Putin would have access to American weaponry and support from American soldiers. Considering the imperialistic narcissism of Putin and Trump (who both appear to suffer from some psychiatric ailment), it’s no longer completely inconceivable they might stumble into a border confrontation with China. Particularly since they both emphasize white identity politics. I would never have thought it possible having spent half my life in the Cold War era, but so did millions of other Americans who now admire Putin and want to be more like Russia. Considering the willingness of so many Americans to go along with the dismantling of the Republic and historical alliances, they probably wouldn’t finally draw a line at helping Russia in a border war with China.
It can't be done overnight. The American public isn't ready yet. There has to be more propaganda. Hopefully, that gives democracies a chance to make defensive plans.
We, most likely, will be weakened with economic problems from the ignorant/arrogant measures now being put in place.
That only works for more advanced US supplied weapons, or those containing important US techology. Recently the 3 biggest US military manufacturers have been losing in stock market, & 3 biggest European have been gaining. Expect that trend to continue.
The influence of Trump/US is bound to diminish over time.
For Ukraine, it is only certain advanced technology in near term critical to protect cities. On the front lines it is much less problematic, since they produce much of their own arms & Europe has already been stepping up.
OMG.
I've been there. Years ago, I scheduled a trip to St. Peterburg for my family to visit Russian grand parents. When Putin started locking up tourists, I canceled, losing much I had already paid for. Now Putinism has come to America.
It never left.
"Just to be clear, I’m much more worried about the threat Trump poses to democracy than his bad economic policies. "
I'm not at all sure you can decouple those two things. Destroying democracy here really makes it clear that Donald Trump IS the United States. His reputation as a skeevy untrustworthy business partner has been built up over his entire lifetime. Only the fact that America still has (at least notionally) some semblance of democracy that could conceivably lead to Trump's peaceful ouster is what keeps the rest of the world doing any business with the US at all.
But if Trump literally becomes dictator and the US is his personal brand, I think you'll see this country crater in ways that can't be anticipated. From US exports falling to functionally zero to countries such as China and India become the world-dominant forces by default, the US could be rendered not just a pariah but an irrelevant and impotent giant.
I agree. Democracies need healthy economies that support and grow the middle class. I think the reason populism/fascism has been gaining traction and incumbents are being thrown out, both here and in Europe, is people have been deeply dissatisfied with their economies. The too slow recoveries after the 08 collapse and post-Covid have badly weakened support for democracy.
In ‘08 EU governments insisted on austerity which severely hampered their ability to recover. The US had the best recovery because Obama spent significantly more, but he was prevented by Republicans from spending enough to speed up our recovery.
That same austerity approach was aplied after the Covid economic collapse, except in the US where the economy bounced back robustly because Biden spent bigly. Unfortunately the majority of voters had no idea that the US economy was so strong so they voted for Trump to “fix” our nonexistent recession.
What I find currently is the reaction to those two events and the reaction to the Great Depression. Americans embraced the New Deal after Hoover’s austerity policy for nearly 40 years afterwards. They also rejected the American fascist movement in the late 1930s. Since 1980 US voters keep embracing trickle down economics (a form of austerity), then complain it doesn’t work for them. So what’s different about between the two eras? The biggest difference is civil rights, with women and minorities having achieved greater equality until the recent roll backs. Another is the mythology presented on TV to Boomers when they were children, which seems to have supplanted reality for that generation and its offspring. Pinpointing why Americans have reacted so differently could result in a remedy.
I think you need to look at what most people are watching or listening to. When I’ve talk to fox opinion viewers, they are clueless about well publicized issues which I assume other opinion media including FB either block or play down. The number of protests is barely mentioned, if at all, on both legacy and opinion media. Calling them news is a false narrative IMP.
This is an interesting question and I often wonder why the widespread outrage of the banking system bailout after the 08 debacle did not destroy trickle down. But I think it has to come down to this victim mentality that reacts to scarcity by wanting to take away from the “other” rather than to confront the real culprit: anti democratic wealth disparities.
Viewers of Fox "News" and followers of Donald Trump have been propagandized to believe that any program that aims to help the disadvantaged is taking away money from a limited pool of funds, and that the deserving (white, middle class, etc.) will suffer grievously. On the contrary the multiplier effect of sharing the wealth produces greater wealth, because the little people spend their money in the same economy as the rest. Likewise the lies told about the deserving vs. the undeserving result in the inability to fold people into a productive whole and lots of energy being wasted on justifying the unjustifiable exclusion from productive society of a whole segment of the population.
And thus we find ourselves in this unbelievable situation where many poor and middle class voters have chosen the candidate that best serves the tech oligarchs at their expense
Strictly speaking, not even democracy is needed any longer to oust Trump, only rule of law. He can only serve two terms. After that, only lesser office is available, he loses the recently discovered immunity from prosecution of the unitary executive, and the prosecutions can resume preexisting and new.
Given the legal jeopardy hanging over his head, though, we should assume the man to be highly motivated to find a way to stay in office beyond is tenure, and willing to do most anything to avoid jail time.
A derelict so to speak.
Hey!
I have just returned from London and the anti-American sentiments are real. People are relieved when they hear one also thinks Trump and Musk are insane racists, but the economic costs to the US are going to be real. No one wants to travel to a place where they worry they will be locked up and which is openly supporting Russia and enacting tyranny.
I will shed no tears for the lost sales by the war profiteers. Frankly I would cheer if Lockhead, Raytheon and Grumman all went bankrupt. I will also she no tears for the Floriduh tourism industry. The voters of Floriduh love to elect Republicans. Let them feel the consequences of their bad choices.
I am with you on Florida but not so sure about the military companies - unless all cocuntries in the world do the same.. Instead of building bombs, the world should be focused on solving the climate crisis before we destroy ourselves..
Wars are very bad in very many ways, including by distracting from the need to urgently solve the climate crisis. Unfortunately, in the neighborhood of certain countries, true peace, in the sense of the peoples getting along with each other without threatening each other, isn’t available. So we need to settle for credible deterrence to prevent war, and for that reason military companies cannot simply be gotten rid of. I’d support clear rules though against the supply of military equipment to countries whose military stance isn’t clearly purely defensive.
This. China will be almost certainly be taking us on within a few years. Xi has publicly said he wants the PLA/PLAN to be ready to invade and take Taiwan by 2027.
I said back in the early 80s that we should give Florida to Cuba. There.
I work in online marketing in Germany, and most of our tools are US based. Those tools need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and ePrivacy directives, which means a vendor in a 3rd party state needs to make sure that in his country personal data is protected in the same way as within the European Union, including a way to seek legal redress for privacy violations, which is not easily possible since a privacy violation by EU standards would not grant anyone standing in an US court. That was mitigated by the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework, which largely relied on an Executive Order by former President Biden. Not only has Donald Trump dissolved the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as one of the cornerstones of the Data Privacy Framework, it would probably also difficult to convince a European court that a country that grants Edward "Big Balls" Coristine access to government databases after he has been fired by a previous employer for leaking secrets could be trusted to handle personal data of EU residents responsibly. So we are all now just waiting for the moment when somebody actually brings this to court, because if the EU insists on enforcing their own law, this just would blow up all internet related business in Europe. In the long run it means Europe has to build its own cloud computing, crm, analytics etc facilities, so there is another bit of business that will go out of the window for the US in the long term, because this time it will not be possible to convince anybody that the situation can be remedied.
Unfortunately we, the US, are no longer trustworthy in any industry, any arena.
One of the things that are new is that most people thought, even knowing that the US would not take our privacy law too seriously, that there was no real danger because after all the US are the most reliable ally. In this brave new world it is kind of a spooky idea that the US government can get easy access to location data and behavioral patterns of a few hundred million Europeans. People complained about the complexity of privacy laws, but these are the situations they were designed to prevent. But nobody believed those laws would have to protect us against the US. Once we take the effort and unravel this dependency, and given your tendency to pivot on a dime between moderates and fascists (if there will even be an opportunity to pivot in the foreseeable future) there will be no going back, and living in a permanently more divided world might be necessary, but is still a sad thought.
I find that extremely sad.
Add Trump being in favor of Artificial intelligence, bitcoin and his chosen media alone will be the death knell for truth.
OTOH it might not be too hard to find Americans experienced in these areas who are willing to come to Europe and help set up and work in these businesses.
Technology is not really the issue, for most software there are alternatives already -it is not that we do not know how things work, it's that competing with oligopolies so far has not been commercially viable (more social equality in Europe also means not so much money sloshing around to fund random businesses until one becomes the next Google or whatever). Transitioning a continent away from US software without breaking the businesses that rely of it will be the problem (also an opportunity obviously, but still difficult and expensive).
I was thinking more along the lines of UK hiring the Americans who work on things like maintaining the UK’s nuclear submarines.
I can't keep from noting how breathtakingly careless of the people to have cast a vote for President. My God, President of the United States! For such a morally, incompetently, and insanely unqualified person as Trump. Would anyone want such a person teaching their children? Would anyone consider such a person to be their doctor? Would anyone want such a person coming into their house to fix a washing machine?
But President? Why not. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably, they thought that when the temple was pulled down it wouldn't fall on them too.
Even if the next (will there be a next?) Administration was Jesus and Moses, it could not restore the trust we once had. There will always be the chance we might go crazy again. The damage has been immense, and it suspiciously looks like everything Trump has been doing is Putin's wish list.
Orin, after the lights are out your point is what haunts. Do American's want their children to emulate this man? It feels as though the reaction is about to go exothermic.
As a chemist I resent using chemistry to make a point. Exothermic indeed!
But that's just my "reaction"
LOL
As in "I resemble that remark!" Curley :-)
The thing to understand is the electorate is irate and therefore irrational. I’m not a big student of German history, but I don’t think Hitler would have gotten anywhere without Weimar and the outrageously expensive Treaty of Versailles. As long as we don’t address our ongoing assault on the working man, we risk many more deeply anti-qualified candidates for office, because Joe Sixpack wants to burn it all down.
The malfeasance is a feature, not a bug. They voted FOR this.
I'm an American living in the UK. We were going to go to NYC in September for our anniversary, and we cancelled it because of FOTUS.
Canadian here. The whole F-35 procurement was the biggest scam.
You want to talk about subsidizing allies, Mr. Trump?
The United States bamboozled its allies into paying for the most expensive fighter jet in history by luring them with the prospect of fancy kit in exchange for... crippled domestic maintenance services contracts.
Sixty-five years later, the folly of the Canadian government cancelling the Avro Arrow development program becomes apparent. Cancelling that one lighthouse project severely damaged our military industrial capability for many decades afterwards and nearly destroyed Canada's aviation sector in the process. The brain drain and the resulting loss of know-how that resulted from it was devastating.
And we did it because the Americans said, "We have a cheaper one that is ready to go. We'll share it with you. Trust us, we're your friends."
Well, that malarkey is f---ing over, if you'll pardon my French.
One of the arguments for this abandonment was always of the form "Canada is too small a country to support advanced fighter development."
Fast-forward to today. There is a substantial chance Canada will now be buying the SAAB JAS 39 Gripen instead. The Gripen is an advanced fighter built by Sweden, a country of (today) 10.5 million people.
It's rarely the first-order effects of a bad choice that get you. It's the nth-order effects.
The American electorate are about to find out how that feels.
Canadians should look to Sweden and France. They both have developed their own fighter airplane.
Then there is Eurofighter.
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-03-eurofighternextgen-taking-the-eurofighter-to-the-next-level
Lost sales may be one of the few things trumpie magats at all wealth levels may understand, assuming the data make it through the propaganda shield and their own brain fog
Nest up; crude is traded in Euro
He was run out of NYC & ruined Atlantic City & that didn't stop him.
The New York/New Jersey media mostly treated Trump as a colorful celebrity, not the corrupt man he really was. That information was known because there were a couple of journalists — the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Cay Johnston — who reported in depth on Trump’s criming but most chose to turn a blind eye. Barrett began covering the Trump Org’s shady dealings starting way back in the 70s; Johnson’s reporting focused on Trump’s corrupt dealings in Atlantic city. Law enforcement also kept giving Trump a pass.
👏🏽
It was obvious even 3,000 miles away there was something odd going on with the NY press. Virtually every community has had its version of Trump, but the local media didn’t treat them the way NY media treated Trump. The fourth estate in NY really failed the country.
Cops and feds always serve those with the money. No thanks to robbers.
Did he pay people for that police pass?
As well as NBC & CNN, or he’d be unkown nationally.
Yeah, growing up in Pennsylvania, I had to hear about his nonsense my whole life. I still remember seeing constant tabloid headlines about his affairs and divorces when I was a kid in the 80s while going grocery shopping with my mother.
For a wealthy person, all that matters is tax cuts. Ask any of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and they will gently explain to you that it is far better to pay $20,000 in taxes on $100,000 than it is to pay $250,000 in taxes on $1,000,000. It's just simple math!
So they'd rather make 80k than 750k. Yep. That makes sense.
I think (I hope) he was just being sarcastic. He just forgot the /s at the end. I hope. I really hope.
NZ has recently tried to follow a similar slash-and-burn approach to government spending on the back of tax cuts for the wealthy. But those euphoric benefits quickly dissipate as public costs are transferred into real private costs as social systems begin to crumble.
Everyone needs to understand, this will not end in four years. Maga Malcontents will remain after Trump has stoked their rage. It's the justice evading Republican Revolution first declared by Newt Gingrich in 1994. It's real
Yeah, that’s what makes this go-round so much worse than the first one. He could croak this afternoon and because he’s stuffed the government full of neo-Nazis hellbent on destroying democracy, the carnage would continue. I’m certainly not advocating this, just an observation, but this will not end non-violently.
Watch Bad Faith documentary for a chronicle of the Christian Nationalists plan to dismantle the government - https://www.badfaithdocumentary.com/. Trump is only a tool. The damage will last beyond his administration
It was declared even before Newt. In 1953 Joe McCarthy, together with Roy Cohn and Tricky Dickie, set the monster in motion. From there it was a straight line: Tricky Dickie -> Reagan -> King Bush I -> King Bush II -> King Krasnov.
McCarthy was a Democrat.
Nixon's friend was Bebe Rebozo in Miami, a neighbor. Now Republicans have BiBi Netanyahu and I fear he is a source being cultivated for weapons here.
You are thinking about Eugene McCarthy who was as far away politically from any of these guys. He was the quintessential peacenik. Same last name different parties, states and ideologies.
Fortunately, Skynyrd is seldom confused with Lynyrd.
Hah! I see what you did. I must be traveling on.
I voted for Eugene. He was no Joseph.
Actually, no, McCarthy was a Republican:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
One of us was ill advised by the internet. How curious. Thank you.
Joe McCarthy was a Republican. "Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957."
https://www.historynet.com/the-death-of-tailgunner-joe/
The untimely death of Joe McCarthy due, apparently, to hepatitis (no attempt in the story to explain where this came from) and alcoholism. He made some attempt to come to terms with political opponents when it was already too late.
Nope, not kings. Assholes, fascists are the proper terms.
Yeah, that too.
I realized that Republicans were the biggest speculators in real estate as a real estate appraiser since the late 70s. They disgraced we experts and now AI and tech bros would have our profession all but fired!
Many appraisers are small shops of very independent individuals who have consistent education on fair housing laws and ethical rules that require us to address relevant data upon which to base our conclusions and opinions. Yet we have been censored by Fannie and Freddy and new appraisals for loans will pre-populate your assignment with AI comparable sales.
Another non-staff, untrained sub-contractor will go by the house and take photos. Probably not interiors, so all that remodeling or upgrades are not known. Nor are defects in construction or non-operable appliances or plumbing.
Algorithms didn't serve Zillow's ability to flip houses, but they contributed to the exorbitant appreciation in prices!
We have bailed out the S&Ls in 1990, let the banks engineered a new financial crisis in 2007, and now we have gambling in the stock market and the powers that be are not interested in an independently appraised property will only get in their way.
I think other countries‘ monetary authorities should be (and probably are) thinking hard(er) about diversifying their reserve currencies . . . another aspect of loosing trust - or imperial hubris. . .